It’s 9:58 p.m. Sunday. October I don’t even know what. The 23rd? Sounds right. I’ve just spent another perfect weekend with one of my new good friends. It’s a good life, the weekend life . . . If only life were only weekends.
You see, school stresses me out. I’m a perfectionist and not the fastest or always the most focused of workers. I get distracted from grading and planning by other more delightful things: running, working out, hiking, reading, facebooking. I love teaching because I love kids, but even teaching can be tiresome. Since becoming a teacher, my respect for teachers has increased exponentially. When the students go home at the end of the day, a teacher’s work has just begun. I could easily spend my entire weekend at the office.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about teaching, however, is the parents. Particularly at a small, private elementary school, parental support is paramount, and, unfortunately, it is here that parents are hardest to please. It is an added layer in Asia that, thanks to a save-face non-confrontational culture, no one communicates anything directly. So far I have learned of all of my students’ parents problems with me.
. . .
It’s a weird world, this world we live in. People are as varied as the countries they live in, but, in some ways, they are all the same, too. Recently I was trying to compare my experience thus far in Hong Kong to my time in Taiwan, but I find I do not know where to start. The jobs and the locations and the social networks are too dissimilar. Each grand adventure is an adventure to its own.
It is now 10:44 p.m. I suppose I should get back to my grading and planning. It’s going to be a long week, and it’s only just begun . . .
Is it Friday, yet?
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent (namely, me).
shift 
Growing up …… never ends. It’s a good thing.
I agree. But . . . I’m not sure I understand the correlation to my post . . .?
Looking back on this, I am not sure I would understand it either. The kids grow up, they have a lot of growing up to do. You are “growing up”, seeing the other side of the student – teacher relationship, understanding and appreciating the responsibilities of a teacher you never saw before. And I am still growing up, seeing myself and others in ways I never did before. If I ever think I don’t have more growing up to do, I will be in trouble. Had just been through some days that had made this pretty clear to me, and the result was this very “what????” comment!
So….it really could be said a number of other ways, but this was what came to mind at the moment I wrote it.