A Few Unorganized Thoughts About My Life as a Full-time Teacher

Sigh.
Tonight is yoga night. This means I will be up later than usual due to the energy I get from the class.
So. I have been meaning to sit down and document something job-related for a few weeks now, and 9:30 on a Thursday night following yoga seems like a great time to do it.

I love my job.
I'm not head-over-heels in love with it. I don't wake up with a burst of energy, fighting the urge to arrive to work early with donuts and coffee. (Actually, I have been wanting to bake some whole wheat banana chocolate chip muffins. This may get me some strange looks, but several of the women at work are quite open to eating healthier things, and my food choices have already been called "hippie," so.....)
But.
I love that I get to be stability in the lives of people who find very little stability anywhere else. I love that I am learning more about what it means to love. (Oh? Love doesn't mean "accommodate everyone's wishes"? Hm.) The parts of love that I've been working on the most lately are boundaries, compassion, wisdom, and patience.

Boundaries. I don't know if anyone ever grows out of wanting to be taken care of, and many of my students, never being really nurtured seem to crave boundaries more than a lot of people I know. This is hard for me, because I don't like to "lay down the law." I don't like to be firm and demanding, but sometimes it actually serves the students well to take a stance and stick to it.

Compassion. The much less straight-forward aspect of my job. I have students with crazy stories, deep hurts, twisted thinking patterns (when asked to define beauty, my students classified it as something like being conceited), and messy lives. My job is to teach them, but (as told by my boss) it is also to act as a disciplinarian, a mom, and a psychologist. Sometimes I have to talk to my students individually about (mental, physical, emotional) things that are inhibiting their work. I love them, and I think they are beginning to sense that because it seems that they are beginning to trust me more bit by bit.

Wisdom. I'm thinking I need equal measures of compassion AND wisdom for my job. Because as much as I need to be understanding, and even accommodating, I have had students try to pull one over on me MANY times. It seems that the best thing I can do is take my days moment by moment and make the best decisions I can during those moments.

Patience. This is NOT my strong point. There have been many days that I have wondered what I was thinking when I went for this job. That I have wanted to quit, yell, go home and eat (eat, eat!), and take a loooong vacation. But I keep in mind that I am here to help my students, and sometimes I get encouragement. In large amounts. I actually have a really great boss, great co-workers, a great husband, and great, beautiful, flawed, and very individual students. Working with people is hard, but it's the best part.