There are so many things that education schools do not and honestly cannot prepare you for. This isn't anything that hasn't been said before, but occasions do come up that remind you of it, whether your first year or your eighth or your twentieth.
Your classes may teach you how to respond to hateful things coming from tiny mouths, but they don't tell you how you'll worry about that student over weekends and breaks because you know they're repeating something heard at home.
Your classes may give advice on how to work with kids working through grief, but they won't tell you how to handle students looking at an empty chair where a friend used to sit or how to pick a funeral arrangement for a young life that ended far too early.
Your classes will tell you about transient student populations and homelessness, but they won't tell you about the panic when the secretary asks if a student made it to school because their home was boarded up and a foreclosure sign was on the door when the bus came to pick them up that morning.
Your classes will talk about how poverty affects students, but not about how you'll feel when you see a student wearing the dinosaur sweatshirt and shoes you picked out when for "Child-M, age 5, likes dinosaurs" when you and your colleagues adopted a local family for Christmas.
Teaching can be hard, messy work. Why? Because we're not dealing with widgets. We're dealing with human beings learning how to navigate the messiness of life. These developing humans are why we get up and go to work every day. They're why we love our chosen profession. And the amazing things they're capable of make the risk of heartbreak worth it.
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