Exactly one week from today starts another year of teaching high school math. The thought of returning to work fills me with mixed emotions. I really enjoy teaching, and I am very fond of my students, but I also love having time for writing and reading while being able to keep my own schedule rather than being stressed out 24/7 for ten straight months. People who know nothing about teaching have no idea how strenuous and time-consuming it is. At one point last year I kept a brief log of my working hours and realized that I average 52 hours doing schoolwork each week, either at school or at home.

It is ironic that I teach math when all my life my favorite reading and studying areas have always been history and english. But when I started college, I had no intention of being a teacher, and it seemed to me that neither of those areas were particularly practical as majors. So I selected math, which was the third area in which I was good in high school.

When I was in grad school, part of my assistantship required me to teach two undergraduate classes each semester, and I enjoyed them. After getting my M.S. in math, I was accepted into a doctoral program, before I realized that I definitely did not want to devote my life to doing research in mathematics. In fact, I wanted to write science fiction, so I needed a career which afforded me time to write, and the two months’ summer vacation all teachers have seemed ideal for that.

Fortunately, I turned out to be a better teacher than I was a writer, and the rest was history (well, not really, if you know what I mean ☺)