At 2:45 pm, the students have already left the classroom. The door is slightly ajar, just open enough to let the teenage energy dissipate from this great green room. A whiteboard displays equations, diagrams, and words in different color markers. Desks once rigidly paired are slightly misaligned with untucked chairs and random doodles on them. The random handout, pencil shaving, and returned assignment lay on the floor. This teacher sits at his desk, still decompressing from another day of more than a hundred students over the course of eight periods. Two large stacks of ungraded papers and lesson plans hide his hands from the casual passerby.

He’ll need a few more minutes. He’ll shake it off. He’ll do this again tomorrow. He’s passionate. He’s tired. Millions of other teachers get it.

I get it, too. It’s February. There’s a whole litany of reasons for why children and the adults charged with caring for them are tired. After 100 days of having to with and for one another, we all need a cool-off from one another. Kids won’t sit down and pay attention to a 25-minute lecture? Adults won’t do it, either, and we’re paid to do that (kinda). Kids don’t want to wait for the bathroom? Teachers have to either wait until their schedule says they can use the potty or beg a colleague in the hallway with one foot in the door to hold down the fort.

Kids aren’t prepared for class? How’s that lesson plan from two years working out for us?

But I can’t shake the feeling of the cumulative exhaustion so many of us have in this work. No school year happens in isolation. If anything, our years are a collection of experiences from years past, pushed to the present. I know how many times I’ve said to myself that I would develop a project around a unit only to fall back into “Don’t get caught doing something your administrator won’t get.” And I have a completely different principal this year, too. I’m aware that we can change the template of our lessons, but I’m still going to fill in every box with something. I know I don’t need super-compliant children, but the aesthetic of a hyper-managed classroom soothes everyone except students.

I look in the mirror daily and recognize that I’m not a fraud (at least that’s what the students intimate), but it’s hard not to feel like it when you put so much work into it and don’t see immediate results of your efforts. That, too, is teaching.

It bears repeating that teachers bear the brunt of multiple challenges to their central work. For those who dare take this work on justly, we recognize poverty, institutional and environmental racism, high-stakes testing culture, economic stratification, the dearth of equitable resources for our schools most in need, inadequate support for students with interrupted formal education and/or special needs, and any number of elements that come into reasons why students may not adhere to strict educational norms. The people around you can make you feel like you’re supposed to work at peak levels when they’ve never known what that’s supposed to look like, have never taught, or left teaching after a brief stint just to beef up their resumes. What’s more, none of these obstructions suffice as excuses for not teaching our students well. This internal conflict creates the foundation between student-teacher relationships where we see the urgency of the work we’re doing, the passion that pushes us into doing this difficult work, and the dismay of not meeting our own enormous expectations.

A few students choose a path that you wouldn’t have recommended for them. You blame yourself. You don’t have enough time to get around to all 30 students because you’ve occupied too much mental time on a few. You blame yourself. You’re doing superhuman things and feeling subhuman over it.

So we love teaching, even when it doesn’t love us back. We love teaching, even when it hurts, when it goes directly against our ideals and visions, when we tell ourselves in the pressure-filled moments that we’d rather be doing something else. That alone should give us solace because it makes us almost exactly like the young people we’re trying to chart a course for.

I love teaching. I need fifteen minutes: five to clean up, five to restack, and five to shake off the dread and bring my energy back up. In time, I’ll realign my words and actions to my principles. I’ll bring myself back to why I do what I do.

Teaching from love isn’t perfect, but neither are we. But we’re still deserving of the love we give.