About two weeks ago, I dove headfirst into a long term substitute teaching position in a Spanish classroom. After subbing in various classrooms for a month, I thought I was ready for the normalcy that being in one classroom until the end of the year would bring.

And then I found out that I was taking over from another long-term sub. And my second day was ACT testing and I had only 2 students in one of my classes. I knew that my first few days would be chaotic, but at least with my Spanish 1 classes, we were getting close to something normal by Wednesday.

I was planned out for the rest of the week, and ready to go, and then the school district called their first snow day of the year. Just like that, I was no closer to having a "normal" day.

By the time we got around to my second whole week, I thought that I would have at least one day where I felt like it was all under my control.

My day was so exhausting, I came home and took a two hour nap. There was not a single class that was normal, and it all accumulated in my last class of the day where my computer smelled like it was burning, and I had two students asking for work, but one for work for the past three days and the other for the next three days.

Even though every day teaching has had some new obstacle to overcome, I have never regretted taking the job. Every teacher knows that every day will have some new, different type of chaos, and somehow every day they show up to work.

Teaching is not as easy or as simple as people make it out to be and unless you know someone who is a teacher, you won't know just how difficult teaching is. I don't know a single teacher that went into the profession because they thought it would be easy, they go into the profession because they have a passion for what they do.

Being a substitute teacher is no walk in the park either. You wake up every morning knowing that the whole workday will be chaos. Not only do you have to come into a classroom as a stranger to a group of kids who are used to routine, and try and keep as much of that routine as a completely different person. Also, there are so few of the kids who will act the same for a sub as their normal teacher.

The public might think that teaching is hard, but there's no way to know just how difficult the job really is until you step in front of a classroom. Teaching is a profession that is undervalued, but it's also a job that so few people could actually do.

There are so few days in a classroom that go exactly according to plan, and so long as people believe that teaching a profession that anyone could do, teachers will never have the chance to earn the respect that they deserve.