In 1999, I retired from teaching--a little more than fourteen years now.  From all the things I see on TV that go on in the classrooms today, I don't know how teachers can survive.  Neither can I understand how the students themselves survive.  I see fighting among the students and calling one another all sorts of names, students hitting their teachers and cursing them, and a breakdown of the educational system in general.  When I look back to 1999 and thirty years beyond that, I am so appreciative of the students who passed through my classroom doors each year.  I was tough on them, but they met my challenges and worked like soldiers, trying to please me.  I had the reputation of being strict.  I suppose it was because I required words to be spelled correctly, cursive writing was a must, and their work had to be done neatly and on time.  If the students didn't finish their assignments in class, then they took it home and finished it there.  Students who didn't turn in their work the next day had to pay the consequences.  Even back then, there was the cry from educators that, "We need to put more money into education."  No, what we needed then was a well-decorated classroom, a chalkboard, pencils and paper, textbooks, desks, students who were willing to work, a well-trained teacher who was willing to teach and not afraid to discipline, and parents who were willing to let all this take place on a daily basis without trying to run the classroom themselves.  Now, I didn't have a problem with the parents helping out when it was necessary, but heaven forbid they should sit themselves down and do the assignments for their son or daughter, as if I didn't have each student's handwriting imprinted on my brain from grading mountains of papers.  Perhaps some may think I was a tyrant.  I wasn't.  I was kind to my students; however, there was a line drawn between us--that is, I was the teacher, and they were the students.  We were not best friends.  Their best friends were other students in their classroom or perhaps in another classroom or maybe from another school altogether.  When I happen to "run into" former students today, most of them tell me the thing they remember most about being in my class was that I read to them everyday.  I don't think they ever caught on that it was something I really enjoyed doing--just hearing them laugh or catch them wiping away tears when a passage was sad.  That's the way it was, in the classroom I left behind.