it's the most wonderful time of the year

Time for shiny apples and sack lunches and sharp pencils and new shoes.  I love school!  The smell of brand new notebooks and unmarked textbooks.  The butcher paper bulletin boards.  The cream of wheat breakfast on the first day.  

In just one short semester, I will be a teacher.  I've been collecting things for my classroom.  My mom keeps buying me wonderful books.  I've been filing away lesson plans and unit strategies.  I bought some black slacks so that I can look professional.  Bailey promises to find me a "teacher sweater" when I graduate.  (You know, those hideous ones that are interactive and themed?)

And even though the prospect of being responsible for the education of numerous young students overwhelms me completely, I recently came upon this excerpt which captures beautifully one aspect of what I have heard called "a noble profession": 

The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and books and people and numbers and concepts and ideas that they have never heard about or thought about before.  I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge.... Just think about what you know today.  You read.  You write.  You work with numbers.  You solve problems.  We take all of these things for granted.  But of course you haven't always read.  You haven't always known how to write.  You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600.  Someone showed you.  There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding.  That's why I became a teacher.  --Phillip Done