Freedom!

Yesterday was my last day at a long-term job that has occupied a lot of my time since the beginning of November. I was teaching a sixth grade class of 31 students in Oildale, a predominantly white, lower class area of Bakersfield. I have to say that I was being compensated pretty well, and the progress that I was making was gratifying. That said, I am looking forward to not working on grading or lesson plans tonight. Any time you work hard on something, it is difficult to leave it behind. I find that it is even more so when your work involves people's lives. I won't get into the specifics of what I was doing, but I think its fair to say that at least a few students were benefiting from what I was doing. Unfortunately, the teacher for whom I have been filling in for the last few months is still unable to return, and the state rules will no longer permit me to be in the classroom because of the type of credential I have.
Thus, the class will be turned over to another substitute teacher who I fear will not do a very good job. This teacher taught this very class for a week before I took it over, and about 5 total assignments were turned in during the whole time. Let's try to do the math on that one real quick: 31 students x about 4 assignments per day x 5 days. That means the whole class turned in 5 out of a possible 620 assignments (if I did my math right)! I feel like I just built a house (a very mediocre, perhaps even poor one, but a house none-the-less), and now someone is going to burn it down. But I did my best, and I guess that's all I can do. It is out of my hands now, and I need to learn not to put responsibilities on myself that don't belong to me.
Sorry if this post is a little to down for some of you. Just being "real" (whatever that means?!).
I also apologize if there is too much "teacher talk" in here. I tried to keep it to a minimum. "Teacher talk" is the phenomenon that I have noticed where two or more teachers find each other in a social setting and then force the rest of the people in the group to listen to them having a two-way conversation about the detailed specifics of their job for hours on end. Have you ever noticed this type of thing happening? Why does it seem that teachers do this almost exclusively. At least in my experience, accountants, construction workers, farmers, secretaries, medical professionals and retail workers don't seem to exhibit this behavior. Put two elementary school teachers in a room of fifty other people, though. In less than 10 minutes, they will have found each other and begin to talk so loudly about work that everyone else in the room has no choice but to stop their respective conversations and listen. I vow to never do this! If you see me doing it -- I mean, if I am crossing the line from simple, polite answer concerning how my work is going, to insanely self-centered teacher-person, I want you to come up and physically hurt me in some way that will teach me a good lesson but not make my wife a widow or hurt her chances of having children with me. Seriously! Hurt me!