teaching.

I'm currently spending this beautiful Sunday afternoon stuck indoors, writing a paper about teachers' relationships with their students' fathers (and how fathers are generally not as involved as parents, don't carry the maternal instinct gene, etc). I actually spent a lot of time on Friday night talking with Nick about my future as a teacher - things I'm excited about, things I'm afraid of, and things I know I need to change about myself. My grad program is teaching me more and more about the myriad of issues that come with teaching and how it is an extremely difficult job to deal with each individual student as well as their parents. I could write a novel on the things I'm anticipating regarding my work with the parents and how I need to work on my confidence in speaking my mind with others. Funnily enough though, just as I was finishing up a paragraph in my paper about how I need to be understanding with parents regarding the fact that my relationship with the students is a complex one and will be extremely different in comparison to their own parents', I took a break to check out postsecret.com (as I do every Sunday), and found this:

This is just a reminder that the wonderful world of teaching has so many layers and complexities, and I won't be alone in experiencing them. I have a lot more to experience and a lot more to learn, but rather than getting more and more nervous about it, I'm getting more and more excited. I chose this career because of my passion for deaf culture and my passion for working with kids, but I'm realizing now that being a teacher is really a case study on humankind and I'm just being trained and prepared to jump right into that crazy world.

And it's going to be a wild ride.