I love my job.

I do. It's true.

The year that I was teaching the fourth and fifth grade, my first year with my own classroom. I wasn't an E.A. and I wasn't a student teacher. It was my first whole class. I was a young, white teacher in a 98 percent hispanic school. I am a strict teacher and this definitely came out that year, not that the students didn't deserve it. However, the parents didn't enjoy it and told the principal so. I was young and white, easy prey.

Here is why I love my principal, Sr. Callejo. In the face of all the parents complaining about me that year, and believe me there were more than a few, he backed me up. Every single time. Not once did he let the parents believe that he was going to reprimand me. He always backed me up. Even when faced with the prospect of losing students (which for our tiny charter school is a big deal.) He understood that the kids needed the strictness that I was providing to the point that last year he moved me out of my successful fourth grade partnership to the awfulness that was the sixth grade.

This summer, Sr. Callejo hired a new teacher to take my place in the middle school slot that I practically got down on my knees and begged to get out of. This teacher, Ms. Wheat is African-American which I mention because I feel that she and I are kindred spirits as neither of us are Hispanic or literate in the culture that we have been thrown into. She has the pleasure of teaching the fifth, sixth and seventh graders (my sixth graders from last year.) I told her that any time she needed to vent, she should talk to me, because I've been there and I know EXACTLY how she feels.

She has been having a world of trouble. Parents have been complaining like crazy to me, to Ms. Tenny, to Sr. Callejo, everyone. I feel for her. She's an outsider in same way that I am. She's going through exactly what I was. She goes home and freaks out in the same way that I did.

When I was going through it, I had no one at school to talk to who took me seriously. She availed herself of that invitation yesterday and HELLO did she. When she asked how I put up with it, all I could say was that every morning, I went in with the goal of getting one thing done in Mathematics and one thing done in Literacy. If I was able to accomplish that, I felt successful. How awful is that?! Finally, someone understood. Ms. Wheat, she understood.

She was saying that the only way she could deal with the seventh graders was to put herself in one room and her husband in another when she got home. I didn't have that ability. I needed The Boy. When I couldn't sleep and would spend most of my nights in tears, he was the one that got me through. There was no one at school that understood. No one that could. When the year was over, I realized that without him, not only would I not have made it, but I literally would not have made it.

Anyway. It's nice to not be the scape goat anymore. It's nice that parents are complaining about someone else. Sr. Callejo even admitted that when he asked the seventh graders they thought he should do to improve the situation, they said that he should, "just bring Ms. Knitter back." So in the end. I must have done something right. Man, do I feel for her.