So I've been posting a couple of essay/articles here recently, trying to correct the impression that teachers are two-faced, lazy, overpaid, and largely incompetent people who are single-handedly bringing down the public education system and the global economy.

Some of my FB peeps (see how hip the cyber-media makes us?) want me to write a book, and I may.

But now, just back from sitting at the bedside of my grandson, who was stricken with pneumonia, watching my daughter grade papers in his hospital room--because both she and I save instructional time for our kids at school-I can't help but remember the emergency C-section I had when my youngest daughter was born.

My regular doctor's wife was also having a planned C-section, and for some reason, her husband decided to attend his son's birth rather than my daughter's.  The hospital was full, and I was told by a nurse that I was actually in a linen room, but I'd be fine.  True?  Don't know.  I was in pain.

A doctor I knew by name delivered my daughter and left for Europe a day or two later without signing my release.  Took me forever to spring myself and a little longer before I got to take my baby girl home.

Doctors are professionals.  When they make mistakes--people often die.  Similarly with mechanics.  Doctors work with humans, as do teachers.

But mechanics work with machines.  One part should pretty much be like another, right?  Why should a mechanic ever be wrong, even if a doctor might?

Yet we teachers, who do work at home, who fret, worry, stew and pray for our students, who try to meet the needs--sometimes impossible needs--of 20 or 30 or x number of individual human beings--have suddenly become as toxic as nuclear waste.  Even the politicians hate us this cycle, and we're usually in with them.

So we sigh, shrug, and go on, worried about which piece of sky will fall next.  Our kids don't suffer--except maybe the ones in the hospital rooms or waiting for us to stop worrying about other kids and focus on them--but our public kids, our students, know we'll get everything we can give every day.

Some days it's more than others, but it usually isn't less.

So--physicians, heal thyselves.  Also mechanics, pilots, lawyers--all of you who had teachers, or have them now, and are seldom held to Olympian standards in spite of the enormous challenges along the way.

Sorry--I guess I mislead you on "brief."  Now back to the lesson I'm working on for tomorrow.