When I was a teacher and I told acquaintances that I taught first grade, the most common response I got was something along the lines of, “Fun! They must be so cute!” If I tried to explain how hard I found the job, I got a lot of quizzical looks.
That is, unless I was talking to another teacher. Teachers of older students in particular usually responded with a shake of the head and something more like, “I don’t know how you do it.”
Yes, my students were quite cute. But teaching them was also an incredibly difficult job, as those middle and high school teachers understood. In the same way that parenting young children is intensive and exhausting and presents any number of intellectual puzzles with no one right answer, teaching young children comes with its own set of hidden challenges.
The above excerpt was originally published in U.S. News & World Report.
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