Teachers, what made you finally give up teaching at your school? Not me, but my wife. She was an engineer

at a good company on the East Coast, left because she wanted more rewarding work. Soon after,

she was doing clinicals at a school on the rough side of our hometown. She was the kind of student

teacher who showed up early, ate lunch with the kids,

stayed late and followed up with parents. Anyway, some months in, she's repeatedly had

trouble with some students. Many of them came from troubled homes and bought a lot with them

into the class each day. She tried working with them one-on-one, working with the administration,

and the parents. More than one set of parents

said, stop calling. And the administration told her to send them to the principal's office,

where they could sit all day and just focus on the good kids. Eventually, the futility set in. She was

the only one who cared. Not the kids, administration, other teachers, or even their parents.

She finally wore herself out after a couple of years with no support at work, and nobody appreciating her efforts.

Except me, of course. She's back in aerospace now.

I worked in a high needs behaviour class. I got hit, punched, and scratched and spat on daily.

But every day I went back and did my best for those

kids. I was so battered and bruised that my husband wouldn't shop with me anymore because people

would stare and sometimes even comment to him about his mistreating me. It was sickening, but I loved

my job and every one of those kids. One day I was called into the office to talk. It was

Christmas time and things weren't great at home,

and as anyone with kids knows, the holidays makes children especially high-strung, so things were

also wild in the classroom. My boss said, you seem awfully stressed, and I thought how nice of her

to notice. So I agreed that, yes, I was struggling. She said, you have six weeks to sort it out, or I'll have to let you go. I was crushed. It literally broke me. Six weeks to just get less stressed? How does that even work? I found myself just showing up to show up, and I realized it wasn't fair for me or the kids. Six weeks later, I got a call back to the office. I was congratulated on

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