Pick a side, any side.

This month I started my tenth year of full-time teaching. My twelfth, if you count two years of substitute teaching.

Last week, I ran into my second grade teacher. She's marking her thirtieth year. Imagine that... thirty years in a second grade classroom.

She is, I suspect, a saint. Small children in large quantities make me nervous. I think it has something to do with the time I subbed as a music teacher and twenty-some first graders mobbed me because they thought that I had Beethoven the movie... not Beethoven the Dead Composer. (He's de-composing, now, by the way!)

Ten years.

The first two marked with the sort of... traumas?... that only wide-eyed innocence and trust can bring to a novice teacher. How bad were they? Let's just say that, during the second year, I began to think that a fender bender on the Parkway (mine, no less!) would be a better way to start the morning then going into work.

By my third year, things started to roll much better. I found a new position at a two-year college and, for the first time, did not get in trouble for thinking outside of the box. In fact, the only "trouble" I ever got into was the time I wore socks and loafers on a Friday -- breaking the company's strict dress code. Considering that I'd once been pounded on for casually sitting on my desk during class and failing students who plagiarized from the Internet, a one-sentence reminder was hardly enough to make me blink.

Given my history, then, I once thought that neutrality would be a Godsend.

Nope. Not for this Gemini. I have this tendency to think too much, and -- as I grow more confident in myself as both as teacher and a woman, I find that neutrality is unpleasantly vanilla.

And so last month I very politely, very respectfully, and very firmly drew my line in the sand. I didn't apologize for what I believed in. I didn't jump to change to make sure my student reviews were less nerve-wracking for the higher-ups. I told my boss that I owed my students an education that would prepare them for the "real world," not just one that would give them gold stars and high self-esteem.

Last week I charged my economics class with researching the demand for their career. Yesterday I assigned worksheets to my psychology students... ones that they would design, not me. Next week, the English students will begin to read poetry and write about it to practice their punctuation.

True, these are not the most demanding assignments in many cases; however, there are deadlines and penalties, demands for perfection, and no exceptions to my expectations.

The result? Standards.