The best job I could ever hope for

Woo hoo. Summer holidays are just a few more ironed shirts away. Then it’s T shirts and jandals and golf and barbecues and games of 500 and swimming in the surf and brunches and...
Summer holidays are excellent, but they’re not the excellent-est part of my job. I skip to school most days. Not literally of course because I have age and coordination issues.
I skip because I’m keen to chat with my intellectual and eccentric colleagues. Sometimes we talk about books and sometimes we talk about art or banks or the Eurozone or hydroponic window gardens. And we have competitions to see who brought the best lunch. 
And there are the excellent kids to chat with too. One boy told me that to help with the environment he’s decided to not wash too often. It’s all about soap and phosphates in the waste water or something. And at least he’s doing rather than just talking.
Of course there’re some brats and rude snots (whose kids aren’t much better) but I think of them as the muddy dull days in April. They make the good kids and the summer evenings seem even better. 
Teachers cop a bit of grief from dear sweet well-meaning friends and rellies. I’ve been told I only work from 9 til 3 “and then there are all those holidays”. I’ve never tried to explain about planning and preparation.
I find a smug smile makes me feel better than trying to explain anything to dullards. I tell them there’re always vacancies for teachers and so if it’s such a sweet as number why not come and join me? They don’t. Their loss. 
It looks like National Standards are here to stay and of course Murdoch’s illiterate yobs will have their fun with rankings. There’ll be excitement and self-congratulations by those at the top but we know that ranking schools is like ranking government departments.
 You can do it quantitatively by measuring unimportant things or you can try to do it qualitatively by trying to measure the important things. The media and the bean-counting Wellingtonians will do their best but get it badly wrong and the general public will get pissy at teachers; again.
The pissier the general public are at teachers and the more they disrespect us, the smugger I feel.
They have no idea how much more fun our job is than selling real estate, how much more satisfying it is than folding bank statements, or how much more satisfying it is than sitting in a select committee room pretending to be very important.
Ah ha ha. I’m a teacher. It’s the best job I could ever hope for.
Peter Giddens