Love is Like That

     After 22 years, I walked away from the classroom.  I never had plans to move into administration until my fifth student committed suicide.  It was no longer enough to love the kids in my classroom.  I knew I needed to start changing the ways schools work.
     It was the hardest decision of my life, and the kids made it even harder.  The district I work for only takes applications twice a year, and people have waited years to be chosen.  I applied in October just to get my name in the pool, happily content to keep teaching.  Two days later I had an interview and two weeks later I had a job.  Had I known I would be leaving in the middle of the year, I would have waited.  My 7th graders cried - even the boys.  Some of the girls cried for twenty minutes in the bathroom.  My 8th graders yelled at me.  "How could you do this to us?"  "Don't you care about us?"  "Don't you like us anymore?"  Ouch.  If they only knew how my heart was breaking at leaving them.
     It's been four weeks and a new semester has just begun for them and for me.  The learning curve is way beyond uphill.  It is loop-the-loop at 150 miles-per-hour.  I am unprepared for what I am doing and lost is an understatement, but love is always like that, isn't it?