Okay, I now understand the appeal of teaching Elementary school students.

When I have been asked in the past what I want to be when I grow up/ what am I going to school for, I have always just answered by saying “teaching.” This of course prompts the individual to ask which grade and subject I would want to teach and without hesitation I say “high school. This usually produces one of two responses. The person either says “Yeah, I would teach high school above anything else as well” or “Really? That would be the last level I would teach.(I find this particularly interesting because most people have an opinion as to what grade they would teach even when they don’t work in the field of education. This seems to infer to me that most people at one time or another have asked themselves what it would be like to be a educator).
I agree with the former group, of course. I have always said that I couldn’t deal with the bodily fluids that seem to always been in the younger classrooms, especially snot. I also think that I would just be a better fit for the high school environment. I think that secondary educators need to be more the professional/mean side than the friendly/kind side of the teaching realm, and I certainly have more qualities of the mean than the kind side. This is not to say that I am not kind, but my default mode is more likely to be commanding than most and it may take a while when people get to know me that I can be kind, too. In fact one of the kids in the Mrs. Louder’s fourth grade class that I visited this week, Uriah, wrote in his card that he thought I was mean when he first saw me but then when I helped him with his math he realized that I wasn’t so mean after all. (He also drew a great picture of me wearing a pink and black polka dot dress with matching shoes). I guess what I am trying to say is that I possess the skills of managing a secondary education classroom than a primary education classroom. Though I did love being in the elementary school for a week.