Maybe I’m in a whiney mood today. Maybe it’s because it’s Monday after a holiday weekend, it’s raining and my computer is giving me fits. Or maybe this is the bald-faced truth: I don’t like being a teacher.

For the past nearly two years, I have been LuLu’s elementary school teacher (or now I'm officiall called a learning coach). It is a job for which I was not trained, nor was I expecting to do (and the pay stinks too!). But faced with no other choice but to send her to a place where she would likely have been abused (through restraints and isolation) in the public school, educating her here at home was the default choice.

And I can’t complain about our new situation with Georgia Virtual Academy. While they are still working out the bugs of expecting 500 students but actually enrolling 2900, they have finally managed to get us logged on and all our materials to us. And their curriculum is good (very challenging) and comprehensive. So I’m relieved of the duties of having to figure out WHAT to teach. I also like that it imposes a structure and timeframe on the lessons, so LuLu can no longer try to convince me that we’ve been doing school long enough on a given day or to move on or skip a lesson. Oh...she can try...but when someone else is imposing the rules she's less likely to peck me to death about them.

Yet, there’s no joy in the work. And frankly, I was spoiled. All the rest of my adult life I’ve enjoyed working. There have been companies I haven’t enjoyed working for, but the work itself was enjoyable. I felt accomplished and successful.

And maybe that’s part of the problem in that I’m not sure of my success. But more than that it’s the amount and kind of patience it takes to teach, and especially to teach children with special needs. LuLu has multiple needs and because she struggles with reading (although not severely struggles, a friend who works in special ed pointed out to me the other day after observing her read), her reading heavy subjects (like science and history) are just plain hard. They also ask hard questions like comparing and contrasting two different presidencies, for example. LuLu, who is still reading at about the 3rd grade level, find this type of digesting and analysis of what she reads especially difficult.

Then there’s the whole working independently thing. For LuLu, working independently is going to be a hard skill to acquire. She gets so anxious that she’s making a mistake (perfectionism) if she’s not able to check in with me during the whole lesson. And the math and language arts levels she’s on require lots of teaching/coaching time on my part. The history lesson is supposed to be done independently. But because she struggles with reading, comprehending and analyzing this material, we do this one together, too – or frustration abounds.

Regardless, even if she were a student with no learning challenges and breezed through the assignments, I don’t think I’d feel much passion for teaching. While I’m happy when the light bulb comes on for her, I am just not getting the same satisfaction that I did from other work.

When I was headed to college, my father gave me sage advice and told me to get a degree in whatever I was interested in and figure out how to make a living from that. His point was that doing something you truly enjoyed was important, as you were going to be doing it for the rest of your life. Earning a living and spending so much time at an occupation you didn’t enjoy was burdensome at best, torturous at worst. Sadly I didn’t follow that advice, but majored in English (because I wanted to) and got a teaching degree (because what else do you do with English?) Student teaching the last semester of my Senior year I decided I had made a terrible err in judgment – I did not want to be a teacher!

I suppose there are countless people whose “jobs” are merely ways to bring in a paycheck. But having been spoiled to know that your vocation can be an avocation, I’m struggling mightily with this teaching gig. Part of me had hoped that my “desire” to teach would appear and that my student teaching experiences of long ago were just bad experiences – perhaps I was a teacher after all…NOT!

Meanwhile, I keep reading news stories about the Teachers of the Year or dig out the Annie Sullivan/Helen Keller story for inspiration. And it does thrill me a bit when I hear LuLu using her vocabulary words in everyday speech, such as

“Mom, I tried in vain to stop, but I couldn’t.” (In vain was a vocabulary phrase from our reading last week.)

Plus, as long as I'm whining, I bet I don't get summers off either!!!

Photo Credit