The Oscar Goes To....

In my training to become a teacher I was never informed that I would need acting lessons. I know I need them because there are times I feel a smile is plastered on my face and I am not fooling anyone. Teachers are expected to be somewhat superhuman. We don't have lives and we live at school in a closet that doesn't have a mirror and is really quite small!! Yet, we are expected to awake refreshed and renewed each and every day. Despite the fact our personal life might be falling apart at the moment, we smile when a child shows you for the fourth time the cut they received on their backyard fence and it is now extremely painful and making it impossible to do their work, ( on the playground five minutes ago they managed just fine!!). We smile and say, "oh, I am sorry, now go back to your seat and do the best you can!!"" Smile, smile. We smile when we look at the homework we received that is torn, in shambles and the student tells you the story of the homework that was at the peril of not making it school, but due to their heroic efforts it made it after all. Smile, smile. We smile in the morning when we welcome our students on maybe three hours of sleep, because we are parents too, and we were up with our own children during the night. Yet, we paste the smile on, and listen to "I am going to Disneyland for the next three days and I need homework to be ready by the end of the day to take with me, (this is usually from your lowest student and you are thinking they should be doing six days a week instead of five, but they are now taking the next three off), but you smile and say, "No problem! Have a good time!" You smile during the staff meeting when you feel like if anymore thoughts or effort come from your brain, you might not make it to your car, you instead smile, smile. Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be. We smile, we act, and then by the end of the day, we actually mean it. We do enjoy our jobs, we wouldn't keep coming back if we didn't, so usually the smile is genuine, but when it isn't the Oscar goes to..................