i thought this piece in slate was really fascinating. it's a week-long diary of a teaching fellow, tom moore, who teaches at a public school in south bronx. he sounds like the most patient man in the world, and even though he writes about kids and things that would have me fleeing new york (students' complete lack of interest, a teacher getting hit in the face with a chair by a young girl), he seems to love his job and have a desire to perservere and help these children with their lives.

teaching, i discovered last year when i worked at the american school of milan, is hard. it's more than just hard, actually; it can break your will to live and make you believe that you are a useless, worthless entity with all the teaching potential of an eggplant. and i worked at the richest private international school in milan, where kids arrived in chauffered cars and the mothers at the parent-teacher conferences wore gucci and armani. hell, where the KIDS wore gucci and armani (junior, that is). so i can't imagine what it would be like at an underfunded, rundown public school in new york city.

i had basically no experience in classroom teaching when i came to milan; the most i'd done was run a summer tennis camp for kids a couple of years ago. but i hadn't come to milan with aspirations of education; i came with a gleam of the arno river and ancient amphitheaters in my eye. i assumed my job at the school would be secondary to traveling, not to mention a cakewalk. i was to be working with five through eight year olds, which i thought would be a blast. playing in the sand with adorable kiddies for five to six hours a day, in *italy* of all places? not a bad job if you can get it.

yeah, so my ass got kicked, predictably. the only thing that saved me is that i didn't have to teach by myself; i was merely an assistant to two fulltime teachers, splitting my time between their classrooms every day. in the beginning, i floated along in the background, doing what my lovely and capable colleagues told me. it wasn't *too* hard; the kids were, in fact, mostly adorable, though i had no idea how to discipline them. christy and danielle (my bosses) were always around to do that kind of hard, mean stuff when necessary. neither did i have to come up with original, creative lesson plans; i chimed in with an idea once in a while, but i figured that christy and danielle were real teachers, and i should leave the real teaching to those who knew best.

imagine then, my complete and utter terror when one morning joan, the school secretary, came in right before class was starting. she motioned me over as some of the early arrivers were shuffling in, and whispered in my ear, "christy just got sick last night and didn't have time to make a lesson plan, so you're in charge today."

oh, holy shit. it was bad. alessandro, a beady-eyed, nasally-voiced seven year-old who liked to draw people throwing up and whom i secretly called "the devil," noticed joan whispering to me. with a manic gleam in his eye, he asked in a sweet tone, "where is miss christy? are you teaching alone today?"

yes, i was alone. so, so alone. that day was a terrible disaster. to start off with, i couldn't figure out how to make the kids do their thirty minutes of morning reading, which they usually sat down to do right away. the thirty minutes instead consisted of me running around, separating troublemakers, and yelling such things as "put that stapler down, NOW!" later, it turned out the aforementioned alessandro had brought in a tiny octopus. a fucking octopus. he said he had hunted it and killed it, but i knew the little motherfucker was lying. one, because he's seven and doesn't go hunting octopus. two, because milan is landlocked. and three, because i KNEW it was one from one of those gross seafood "frutte di mare" prewrapped packages you got in the frozen section of the grocery store. yeah, frozen. so by afternoon, the octopus had been sitting in the sun for several hours on the "science shelf" where i allowed alessandro to keep the thing in its plastic bag, and it was rank. to make a long story short, i ended up flushing it down the mini kids-sized toilet after everyone had gone home.

the trials of that day were too long and innumerable to recount. by 4pm, i was ready to throw myself out the window, but at the same time i was somewhat inspired. things didn't have to be that bad, i told myself; you know this is partly your fault for being slack and not caring. pay more attention. watch the way christy and danielle handle the kids. think about ideas for lesson plans. and most importantly, don't be afraid of seven year-olds. you're much bigger than they are.

after that day, i really started trying. i had always known that i didn't want to teach as a career, but i was there for a year, and i loved the children, so i got myself into gear. and it was still hard, probably the hardest job i've had so far. but it was rewarding, as cliched as that sounds. there really is nothing like hearing a kid you've been working extra-hard with read her first words. or like seeing gaia, a beautiful brazilian six year-old who had learning disabilities up the wazoo, finally count to ten and actually understand what the numbers meant. or having ettore, the class heartthrob who came to school every day with his father on their harley, clamor to sit in your lap during storytime. the kids' affection was definitely the best part, and i almost started bawling when i read a book they had put together for me upon my departure. it included such gems as, "miss catherine taught me where to put a period, it goes at the end of the sentence" and "miss catherine lets me squish her arm when she walks us to gym," etc.

oh, those little motherfuckers. i miss them. but i'm definitely never teaching again.