I made it. After five years, roughly 800 children, and as many calls to the principal's office as the most undisciplined student among them, I can finally say I made it. If you've been following my odyssey as a beginning teacher, what you're undoubtedly wondering is "How?"

Well, it wasn't easy, but I didn't quit, and I wasn't fired -- and that makes me a success story in a state where more than half of beginning teachers bail out by the end of their fifth year.

If memory serves, I first seriously thought about quitting a couple of months into my first semester, soon after my first encounter with an unkind parent. Since then, I've probably thought about it at least a hundred more times.

I can't say for certain when my principal first thought about firing me, but I do know that after reading a published diary entry in which I criticized both her and my school at the end of year two, she sent word that both she and Johnston County Schools superintendent wanted my head on a plate. Thankfully, my head is still attached, and I'm still at West Johnston High. That principal has moved on to teach education at the university level, and that superintendent makes a point of shaking my hand and thanking me for my hard work whenever I see him.

Lest you think that the secret to my survival is that I stopped making trouble, I should point out that in a meeting just over a week ago, my new principal labeled me a subversive. She has proposed some changes to our Freshman Academy that I disagree with, and I haven't been shy about telling her so. Yes, I'm still stirring the pot and ruffling feathers, even as I continue to do battle in my classroom with ignorance and apathy in the iPod generation. When you get right down to it, very little has changed in the past five years.

I still work three jobs to make ends meet, alternating my nonteaching hours between grading SAT essays and doing forest entomology research at N.C. State. I still watch as unmotivated teachers who are simply going through the motions get their checks as regularly as I do. I still encounter testy parents who, dissatisfied with their child's mark, insist that their baby has always made A's in the past, the not-so-subtle suggestion being that I must be the problem. I still groan as well-meaning administrators ignore teacher input and institute ill-fated reforms.

In other words, public education is still a minefield of low pay, loafing parasites, aggressive parents and bureaucratic micro-managers, and I'm no closer to solving the big, intractable problems in education than I was when I started pointing them out in The N&O five years ago. Yet I expect to be teaching for a very long time.

I discovered early on that one of the benefits of teaching is that every day is different. When a lesson goes badly, you come back the next day and start with a clean slate. What I didn't realize early on, though, is that the key to surviving in this career lies in that reality. I may know that nothing ever changes and problems never get solved and reforms never seem to work and my income never goes up as fast as my expenses -- but my students don't. Every year a new group comes in just as excited as the group before, and those students deserve to have me be just as excited as I was the first day I stepped into my own classroom. I owe it to them to leave any residual bitterness or frustration at the door. They, too, deserve a clean slate.

Hope makes the job bearable

So how do you wipe the slate clean? I'm addressing the pay issue by pursuing a master's degree and the 10 percent raise that it brings. I hope that younger, more inspired educators will replace my ineffective colleagues. I recognize now that no matter how it may sound, criticism from a parent is not personal. Even the most unreasonable parent is just that, a parent, and parents have a biological need to advocate for their children. Experience has taught me how to handle those conferences deftly by maintaining our focus on what matters most: the child's success. Finally, when the administration institutes a policy that leaves us teachers shaking our heads, I do my best to smile and hope it will all work out.

In Joel and Ethan Coen's 1994 movie, "The Hudsucker Proxy," an affable simpleton named Norville Barnes endures daily insults and humiliation at the hands of just about everyone around him without ever losing faith in his dream. When he reveals that dream, a simple circle drawn on a piece of paper, his accompanying explanation could be the mantra for teachers all over the world: "You know, for kids."

In the end, the reason we do it, the reason we teach for five years and beyond, no matter how little we make or how much harassment, indignity or mismanagement we endure, is because every single day our classrooms fill up with children who trust us to do right by them. To those of us who believe in what we do, that trust is more precious than money, power, acclaim or prestige. To those of us who know that we were born to teach, the children in our rooms energize us, empower us and protect us from bitterness and burn-out. To those of us who aren't afraid to admit the hokey truth, like Norville Barnes, we do it for kids.

Yes, I made five years, and it wasn't easy. The next five? Piece of cake.