Teaching is such a strange job.

You can be going through a perfectly ordinary day, doing perfectly ordinary things, and then, suddenly, at 2:37 PM, something un-ordinary floats through your door and turns the entire day on its head. And you can’t push this thing until tomorrow, because it has to be dealt with right now. And you also have the rest of your day to get through and you have to pretend everything is still perfectly ordinary even though it’s not.

Okay, that sort of thing can happen in any job, I guess. But for teachers there are kids involved.

And, okay, okay, that sort of thing can happen to parents, too. But for teachers, it’s somebody else’s kids.

And you want to help them out, and you want to do the right things for them, but you can’t because … well, because you can’t, and the best thing you can do is hand them off to somebody else, somebody hopefully better equipped to help them than you. But you feel a certain kind of way about that because this kid came to *you* for help, they trusted *you* enough to come to you, and all you can do is send them on to somebody else, somebody they didn’t *want* to go to.

And you feel sick inside, tearing yourself up with questions like “did I do the right thing” and “was there more I could’ve done” and “have I made things worse”, but due to the nature of these things there will be no answers forthcoming right away or, maybe, ever.

And for obvious reasons, there’s very little about any of this that you can share with anybody, to say nothing of a webpage that’s available for anybody anywhere to read.

We are supposed to have all the answers, but I feel as useless as a square tire.