Every time the new school year commences you can count on two things:

• Impatient parents honking horns as they drop off their children at school.

• A newspaper op-ed piece talking about how hard teaching is.

Almost without fail, the piece is written by someone who has never taught.

As someone who has taught for 31 years, I can vouch for how hard teaching is.  But it’s not necessarily because of unruly students, demanding parents, or overreaching politicians.

For me the hardest part of teaching was the demands that I put on myself. 

I cared deeply about teaching.  It saved me when I was a child.  It saved me when I didn’t have a career.  And it saved me with a decent pension in my retirement.

Most of all, it gave me such a profound sense of importance.  Here I was with 150 kids each day, with the responsibility of taking care of their minds.  That is incredibly stressful.  Except, the nervousness was a good nervousness.

I could not wait to get to work each day.  Teaching kept my mind running at high revolutions.  It’s why once I retired I knew I’d have to find other ways to keep my mind sharp.  Nothing I’ve come up with so far has matched the intensity of working in a classroom.

After a half a year into my retirement, I began working as a university supervisor of student teachers.  It allows me a way to keep a toe in public education by working with young teachers, something I have always enjoyed.

As I sit in a classroom observing the teacher in training trying to figure out if the lesson is working or not, I look at the youngsters sitting in their desks and think to myself how lucky these kids are to have a magician in the room—the educator who is doing her level best in keeping them engaged with material she feels deserves their attention.

The job of teaching has definitely gotten more difficult for myriad reasons.   For me, the attention span of people not just children has diminished precipitously due to technology making it difficult to capture students’ focus and keep it there for extended periods of time.

The trick to teaching today is figuring out how best to keep them involved in learning about things they don’t yet understand nor care about.  The teacher is a guardian of knowledge that she passes down to young people.

That knowledge may be subject matter-based—math formulas, scientific theories, world histories—but more importantly is value-based:  goodness, kindness, decency.

I’ve often said that the classroom is a sanctuary, a place that does not resemble life as it is, rather life as it should be.

That is what drove me to work as hard as I could.  I had a very limited time—180 hours in a year—to get kids to improve themselves as people.

And that is what makes teaching so difficult yet at the same time so rewarding.  Teaching is not for everybody, and certainly not everybody who teaches is effective.  Still, parents should thank heaven for the army of teachers out there who do care, who do give their all, making sure the time spent with their children will be fruitful.

If only a small number of students grow up to be better versions of themselves due to a nurturing teacher, it positively impacts all of us.