Unlike most of my friends, I never thought I wanted to be a teacher. My pals growing up all wanted to be teachers. Or marine biologists. Or pediatricians. Or stunningly beautiful princess-ballerina dancers. I went along with those fads, but I never EVER thought that I should be a teacher. It wasn't because the teachers I knew were so horrible, although they did have a tendency to "seatbelt" children into their chairs and take recess away from the entire class because that one obnoxious eight year old boy in the back wouldn't shut up. (Huh. Turns out I'm still mad about that 14 years later.) Even knowing that my wonderful grandma was a teacher didn't help. I just knew that I did NOT want to be one of them.

It turns out I was wise beyond my years.
Hauptbeispiel: My Sunday School class. I am teaching the 3rd through 5th grade class, comprised of 5-9 girls (only girls, for some reason). They are all very sweet and smart and, since they've all been through confirmation classes already, they know their stuff about as well as I do. The problem is that they are all FUNNY and I cannot concentrate on the lesson for laughing.

I ask a question and they respond by pointing out the window and cooing about the cute birdies on the roof: I laugh.
I ask a question and they give an answer that strikes me as funny ("Well, I bet the rich man didn't trust God to take care of him because he had servants to do that stuff"): I laugh.
I ask a question and the only answer I can get is how this reminded so-and-so of a movie she just saw..... : I laugh.

THEY ask questions. Why do you sit on the desk instead of the chair like a normal person? Did you know that Andrew likes Gracie? Why don't you write on the chalkboard? Can I borrow your shoes when I'm older? Why don't you have a boyfriend? Why is it so cold in our Sunday School room? Can I read next? What does [list 10-15 long, foreign, and/or archaic words from the reading] mean? Why are you teaching us instead of, like, an old grown up? (HA! Loved that one.)

I just laugh. Victoria, my assistant who loves seeing me lose my composure, laughs. The girls look at me like I'm crazy, because these are obviously very serious matters. And then I try calm down and explain things without using any words with more than three syllables, which turns out to be harder than one would expect.

The good news is that they all come and we do get at least a little work done. We read the day's lesson from the Bible and (attempt to) talk about it. At least one of them will have done their memory work from the previous week. And if nothing else, they're getting a vocabulary lesson.