Hard Things About Being a Teacher...

This just popped into my head and I wanted to reflect on it a little bit. Bare with me as I'm a bit emotional right now-(yeah, hormones..gotta love em) so if it sounds sappy, it's not meant to be...

1. Losing a child to death, illness, or even a family move.
It's tough when you lose a student. I lost one of my student to a car accident last year. He was 3. That whole day at school I was numb, I felt like I was going through the motions but I wasn't really there. He was a sweetheart. He always had a baseball cap on and he walked with a little country swagger with 4 fingers in his pocket and his thumb hanging out. He was one of our best sleepers and he just did his own thing. He got along with everybody and I never saw this kid pick a fight or even take part in one.

2. Not being able to reach a child due to varying circumstances.
Whenever I think of this one it brings a whole bunch of emotions to the surface. I think of the 3 1/2 year old I had that couldn't talk. He spoke in broken syllables and most of the time he didn't make sense to us. He would get so frustrated because we didn't understand him and I felt so bad because I knew he wanted something and he was trying his hardest to communicate with us but he just couldn't get the message across.

3. Not being able to protect a child from abuse.
This one hits home with me. I was abused as a child for many years and I witnessed my sister being beaten more then once at the hands of my mother. I have had one run in with child abuse and it was a horrible case of it. For confidentiality reasons I can't go into detail but the two children who were involved-(they were both under 4 years of age) were so developmentally behind do to the neglect and abuse that they had to be moved to completely different classrooms to meet their learning needs. That was the one and only time that I felt that I was truly going to yell at a parent. When their parents came to pick them up I felt like I was going to throw up. Thanks to Child Protection Services dragging their feet I was forced to send these 2 children home with the very people who were beating them. After I left work that night I went home and cried myself to sleep. It's a horrible, horrible feeling to send children back into a place where you know that they are being beaten but yet you cannot do anything about it because it is "out of your hands."

Those are my top 3 hardest things about being a teacher. The second one isn't as intense as 1 & 3 but it's hard to see a child try so hard and still not be able to accomplish what they set out to do.