I re-read the manuscript of my little book, World War II Arroyo Grande, this morning, found it brilliant, and then remembered, because of a degenerative neck disk, that I was loopy on Norco, and “The Berenstain Bears Dig a Septic Tank” on Norco would have exactly the same impact on me as the first time I read From Here to Eternity or Cold Mountain.

Here’s the Magic part.

There are three books, out or about to be released, written by former students of mine. I take no credit for anything they write–except for their history essays–but I am every bit as happy for these books as I am for mine, and now that I know how hard the work in writing a book truly is I don’t even have the words for how proud I am of three young writers: Alex Bittner, Maeva Considine, and Evan Devereaux.

No work is more demanding and more lonely than the craft of writing. With one exception, and that is teaching.

What we do every day in the classroom isn’t work–for me, it was the greatest joy to teach young people like these in my years at Mission Prep and then in Lucia Mar. Nowhere was I more authentically myself than in a classroom, in the time I shared with teenagers.

For most of us, the “work” begins at three o’clock and ends in the dark. The weekends are just two more workdays: we write our weekly plans at our kids’ Babe Ruth games and we grade our essays at Cafe Andreini–seething a little at the guy at the next table burrowed deep inside the Sunday “Times” or the fiftysomethings in bicycle tights about to head up the Huasna. It’s galling to see leisure flaunted so shamelessly while we work in such anonymity.

It takes a toll. My serum cholesterol levels dropped 61 points in the five months after I retired.

We work hard, but the toll is exacted most in the extra work we are required by distant decision-makers to do–mandated in a fantasy world where we actually have the time to do it–and what we do for them is eventually written up in a barbaric language, Educationese. It’s work that almost always has no meaning and does almost nothing to make us better teachers, when wanting to be a better teacher is a constant hunger every good teacher feels. A good teacher would never force her students to do this kind of work because she respects children.

And the work we amass really is meaningless, because within three years it’s all thrown away. A new model rolls into Education–NCLB, OBE, Integrated Teams, The Common Core–so a new paradigm shift sweeps us away and we start a new round of what is most accurately called “busywork.” We feel a little like Rose Parade princesses, with fixed smiles that make even a princess’s jaw ache and endless Rose Princess waves that will eventually numb her arm. We’re like prisoners on a pedagogical Rose Float whose petals will turn brown as quickly as the last one’s did.

And we are told, every time, that we should not fear change. This is insanity, of course, not “change,” what we do to teachers. It’s the kind of busywork that crushes the second-greatest gift a classroom teacher has: her idealism.

Her greatest gift, of course, is the roomful of children entrusted to her, the complex and precious aggregate of human beings she has to face every Monday morning.

I hated Monday first period. I am an introvert and I was terrified every first period of every Monday for thirty years. My hands trembled every Monday for thirty years. But we force ourselves to begin because we worked so hard, when we were alone and anonymous, on our lesson plan. Plans. Mine usually went through two and sometimes three revisions.

Sometimes they don’t work at all and you have to learn to throw the plan out in the middle of a class and fly by wire.

A lot of good teaching is like that: it’s not meant to be weighed, measured and stored in the Skinner boxes the distant decision-makers build for teachers. A lot of good teaching is instinctual, improvisational, and attuned to what the students need in the moments where they depend on your leadership and on your humanity.

By the way, thank God, the anxiety of starting a class dissipates and in a few minutes: we are so absorbed in teaching the plan well and clearly that we really have just the faintest connection to it. Even in the lessons that go well, we teach instinctively, because now we are in a deep, living and constantly evolving relationship with our students.

We aren’t dispensing information. We’re inspiring, infuriating, affirming, correcting, evoking, and confronting.

There is nothing in my life–only the births of my sons come immediately to mind– that has made me happier than my time with children, and the captivity of all the unseen we work we do to prepare is transformed, as if it were alchemy, into the kind of freedom only a teacher understands.

What other career gives you something that approaches the sensation Orville Wright might have felt that day at Kitty Hawk?

And then young adults like these three remind us that what we do is important and powerful. It makes an old teacher like me very quiet inside. My little Wright flyer is safely on the beach again, and the miracle of what we’ve done together is overwhelming.