"Sometimes It's Hard"

Sometimes when you show up to a school you don't have lesson plans.
Sometimes when you show up to a school they don't even have a room or a class for you so you end up doing lunch duty for two and a half hours.
Sometimes when a student doesn't finish his apple, you get to have a snack.

The only thing that's been persistent in the last six months (holy fuck... six months?) have been the question marks I see looming around every corner. There is something that's generally disconcerting about relying on substituting and working at a bar with about 200 other people for my livelihood. At any moment I feel like I can be replaced, but the crazy thing about it is the more I do these things, the more I feel like I'm irreplaceable.

Which makes it that much more disheartening when I'm reminded how easily replaced I can be.

Sometimes you show up and the clerk stares at you and asks "What are you doing here?"

Sometimes you walk into a room and the kids start clapping and "woo-hooing" and general celebrating that you're teaching today instead of their normal teacher. But most of the times after that they'll switch seats and ignore the work you assign them and generally disrupt the balance order of "teaching."

Sometimes you leave your desk to help a student and after staring at their math homework and fumbling out your best guess of an answer you feel like the dumbest person in the world.

Sometimes when you leave your desk to help a student you feel like the dumbest person in the world because they were drawing you out so that their buddy could steal your phone, escape to the bathroom, and dump it in the trash so he could pick it up later.

Sometimes you feel like the bad guy because in a matter of thirty seconds you became another one "of them."

A few times you feel like the bad guy when you watch a kid get dragged out of class in hand cuffs.

Rarely do you feel like the good guy.

Sometimes you only have problems and no solutions.

Sometimes when people tell you that they could never in a million years do what you do, you shake your head, take a sip of your beer and want to tell them they're right. You want to tell them that most people can't do what you do. You want, all at once, to be the sum of all your great parts with lights shining down from the heavens making you the fucking star in this masquerade for once. But most of the the time you just tell them a story and they nod along.

Sometimes it's hard doing what you want to do because it's not what you want to do. Sometimes you just think you know what you want to do and when you start doing it, you realize that you were wrong about it all along.

Sometimes it's hard doing what you want to do simply because it's hard to do what you are meant to do.

There has not been a time since I started subbing about six months ago (holy fuck... six months?) I doubted the choices that I've made. Never have I doubted my career choice.  The great days are great. Smiles come easy, jokes slip off the tongue, and laughing is a normal occurrence. The hard days are really fucking hard.

In these hard days  I question why and how and to what end I am subbing for. The more I'm frustrated the more I want to do something about it. The more I want to help. The more I want to be in the same classroom, with the same kids, day in and day out, watching them grow into men and woman. Men and women that we can look up to.

But that's not what I'm doing right now. I haven't earned the tools yet. I'm still on the sideline watching the starters play. I'll take what snaps I can get, but I have an end goal. I will not be sidelined for long.

Lesson 13: Sometimes it may be hard, but when it's right it's always right.