I love it, but it wears me out. Every day I have to re-invent the wheel. I have to find a new way to say something new to a new group of students on a new day. It's never the same twice. It's a performance, and just as a musician has to inject fresh life into an old song every time he performs it, so too does a teacher need to find a way to keep it alive.
Bad teachers are control freaks.
They see their jobs in terms of setting up very narrow parameters within which students can operate. Good teachers let go of the control, not the discipline, and go down paths that have no predetermined finish. Mark Smith and teaches English and German at Leland Public School, and English at Northwestern Michigan College. He also maintains a web site for a student journal, called the Beechnut Review .