Twelve Things Only Elementary Teachers Will Understand

There are jobs where you sit in meetings and shape long-term strategy. There are jobs where you eat lunch in a real chair, away from the children you teach. Elementary teaching is not those jobs.

Here are twelve things only elementary teachers will fully understand.

1. The peculiar, lung-deep tiredness of a Friday afternoon, that no other tiredness quite matches.

2. The fact that you will, occasionally, accidentally call your own mother "Miss" and your students "honey".

3. Knowing exactly how loud the room is going to get within four seconds of saying the words "free choice".

4. The strange pride of finding a single dried-up glue stick at the bottom of the supply cupboard and being slightly emotional about it.

5. The fact that you can spot a child who didn't eat breakfast from across the playground.

6. Standing perfectly still while a six-year-old whispers a long, complicated, slightly classified secret into your ear about something that happened on the bus.

7. The exact words used by every wobbly-tooth child for the past eleven years. ("It's a wobbly. Look. LOOK.")

8. Realizing in the middle of a lesson that you are, in fact, holding seventeen pencil shavings in your other hand, and have been for some time.

9. Being genuinely moved by a child's drawing of a stick-figure family with the caption "this is you, you're nice".

10. Feeling, on the worst days, that nothing you do matters. Knowing, on the best days, that almost nothing in your life will matter as much.

11. Hearing yourself, in a slightly tired voice, on the train home, repeat the phrase "let's make smart choices" to absolutely no one.

12. Going back, every single September, even though you said in June you couldn't possibly do it again.

To all the elementary teachers reading this: thank you. The world is held together by people like you, doing largely invisible work, often for less money than they deserve, with extraordinary patience. We see you.