We came for chalk and the sound of a question landing,
for the slow bloom of a student’s face when a hard thing suddenly makes sense.
We came with lesson plans like little ships and optimism folded into our pockets,
and somewhere between the photocopier and the meeting room the compass got nicked.

The salary letter arrives as a joke that no one laughs at anymore; the classroom is drafty and full of receipts.
We carry behaviour logs and referral forms like rosaries with which we never meant to pray, counting days in detentions and breath.
The staff room is a ledger of kindness that the budget keeps auditing; we learn to measure care in minutes and after-school time.
Promised support is a biro-signed ghost that drifts through emails and never finds a desk.

We sit with kids who arrive with backpacks heavy as weather, hunger that smells like instruction, trauma that cuts through their attention.
There is a boy whose home is a shifting map and a girl who learns languages so she can name her own survival; we try to teach algebra in the margins of their lives.
We are asked to be social workers, therapists, guardians of safety, and still produce outcomes like factories with human faces.
Every success gets catalogued; every meltdown gets processed and stamped and sometimes, quietly, shrugged.

We count the cuts in staff like tally marks on a doorframe; we mend rot with coffee and late-night marking.
We sit across from parents who are tired the way a coastline is tired: eroded, beautiful, asking what else we can do.
Policy gifts us forms and frameworks; it forgets the small acts that actually hold children steady: a held hand, an unhurried sentence, a hallway check-in.
We are trained to measure progress in percentages and named steps while the human inside the box asks for slower time and simpler mercy.

Sometimes the heartbreak is quiet: a first-year with too many worries to carry, a veteran who stops laughing, a favourite classroom painted over.
Sometimes it is loud: budgets slashed, playgrounds sold in committees, a promise made on a podium dissolving into minutes that never translate back into help.
And still we show up, because one corrected sentence can be a rescue, because a book loaned at lunch is a small revolution, because a teacher’s gaze can outlast a headline.

This is the work that keeps unmaking us.
At the end of the day the corridor hums like an exhausted crowd; we fold our plans into folders and stitch our patience back into place.
We stay because someone will ask a question tomorrow that only we can answer; the heartbreak is the proof that we still believe in teaching enough to hurt for it.