Advice for Someone about to Marry a Teacher

To begin with I do not claim to be any kind of marriage counselor. I am simply giving advice to hopefully help someone who may be venturing into matrimony with someone who has chosen the teaching profession. Now you're in "luck" if you yourself are a teacher, and you are marry another teacher. You don't need to read any further. But for the rest of you, maybe this will help explain how the teaching brain works.

Now if you started dating a teacher during the summer, you were cheated out of a true picture of your love. You had the opportunity to meet the no schedules, no meetings, no conferences, no lesson plans, no worries version of that person. This was a disservice to you because when pre-planning started, you should have quickly figured out that this person had quickly turned into a new strange creature.

Let me explain. When pre-planning hits, we teachers become inundated with emails, calendar invitations to attend meetings (which is funny because it's an invitation, like it we have a choice of not going), Open House, figuring out how to make reading the student handbook interesting, student accommodations to read, paperwork and more paperwork, planning fun and worthwhile icebreakers to get to know the students, and trying to make our classroom warm and inviting. All of this and the school year hasn't even officially started!

Then once school gets in full swing, we have to begin writing ridiculously detailed lesson plans, research new technology to implement in the classroom, develop authentic motivating learning tasks and differentiate those learning tasks, round up the materials that you need in class, create authentic valid assessments, grade those assessments and enter them into the gradebook, display student work, communicate with parents, go to weekly meetings, attend parent conferences, help with a school dance, work concessions at a football/soccer/softball/ or basketball game, sometimes tutor after school, and maybe even sponsor a club.

Our brain starts going in so many different directions, sometimes it's hard for us to think about anything that doesn't involve school.

We aren't trying to ignore you. I promise. We can't help it. We need your patience and understanding. When we start telling you about the boring meeting we had to go to or the rude parent email we received, we aren't asking you to solve our problems. We chose this profession and all that it entails. What we need is just for you to listen, tell us we are doing a good job, and that we are somehow making a difference in the life of children. That's it.

Just remember...the school year (for most of us) is only 180 school days long, and you will get your carefree, summertime spouse back eventually!