Year 10 of teaching done.
Just finished another graduation. I fucking love this job.
It wasn't until year 3 that I started to feel like I was good at it. At year 10 I still have a wide spread of perceived weaknesses, but I'm still having a little more success each year. This year was especially successful and I feel extremely well appreciated by my students. I didn't feel that way at every point in the year, but that's the nature of the beast. In the second semester I enter a dark tunnel of increasingly intense student apathy and neurosis, and it doesn't lift until the last couple weeks of school. In those dark moments they ARE hearing me and ARE appreciating me, but are incapable of showing it. It's impossible to know that as a new teacher, but having been here a while my confidence that they'll soon be telling me how much they loved the class helps carry me across the apathetic abyss.
And actually, honestly, I've never felt more appreciated as an educator as I do right now with this graduating class. I'm so glad I found this career and persisted through the learning curve, political bullshit, and periodic low points. I feel like my professional life is meaningful, which is what I hoped for when I started down this path. At 10 years in I'm finally confident that it was absolutely a positive decision.
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