I feel like I'm in the wrong profession. I understand that when someone is just starting to work and all that, he/she will have doubts from time to time, but I have it daily. That can't be normal. I've had this talk with a lot of my friends, teachers and non-teachers, and they all keep telling me the same thing - it's your first year by yourself, you're not terrible, you'll get better, you can't expect to be really good right from the start, etc. That all makes sense, I understand that. It's just that I have this image of what a teacher should be like in my mind, and I'm nowhere close to being that. A teacher should be a role model, someone the students look up to and go to for advice and a shoulder to lean on. A teacher should be nurturing, encouraging, understanding, loving to the students, no matter how the students acts during class. A teacher should never give up on a kid, even the hopeless butt heads that don't listen to a single thing that she says. In fact, a good teacher would try even harder to get the kid to understand, and get behind the real problem for the bad behavior and bad grades. I have teacher friends that say, "Well, we don't get paid enough to take that kinda crap, so just write them up." I think that's a really terrible mentality to have as a teacher. Shouldn't we do all that we can before we resort to reporting them to the higher ups? Is it a sign of weakness to not write them up? If it is, I probably seem extremely weak to my students. I really try to talk to the student and understand why they're behaving that way. But most of the time, it just doesn't work out. And it's obviously all my fault. I just don't have it in me to be a good teacher, I guess.