Last week, I finished building my coffee table, and here it is! Everyone asks: What kind of wood is it? After I answer “black walnut,” they nod sagely and then ask: How long did it take? So I tell them. It took eighteen months. (Just for the record, it’s not the only thing that I got done during that time.) “Wow, that’s like two pregnancies!” one of my students commented. It was a strange analogy coming from a sixteen-year old boy, and one that made table-building seem less impressive, even if I did get a few other things done during the same time period. I started asking myself: What exactly have I been doing the twelve years since I graduated from college?

So I thought back to the year 2000, when I was standing in front of a class of sixth-graders in Harlem shouting “¿Cómo eres?” and throwing a lobster plush toy in the direction of the most insistent “ooh, ooh, me!” A pretty girl caught the lobster and answered “Yo soy linda. ¿Y usted?” She flashed a big smile at the rest of her class before tossing the lobster to me. I smiled back wondering if the director would cast Julia Roberts in the “transformative teacher” role or if I could star as myself. Admittedly my first few months could have been written in a textbook of new-teacher mistakes, but that would only give the turnaround more dramatic appeal.

My self-congratulation was interrupted when I realized that two of my students were flicking a folded paper football back and forth across the table. I asked them to put it away. They did, but a few minutes later it was out again. “Move right here where I can see you,” I said in my firmest teacher tone. Actually it was another teacher’s firm tone that I was just mimicking, but at this point my classroom management style could best be described as a two-pronged approach: “fake it till you make it” and “if you bake them cookies, they might like you.”

There were no spare desks in the room but there was a clear spot on the carpet by my feet. The students moved grudgingly to the carpet. A few minutes later I noted that they were attentive and focused, converted into model students by my excellent behavior management techniques.

I don’t think that anyone would get through their first year teaching without some delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately that elevated sense of importance is also what makes it so hard. You think: I am doing the most important job in the world. So when you realize the truth: I am doing the most important job in the world BADLY, by extension that means that you are RUINING THE WORLD. Then you bake cookies, which makes it seem like you aren’t doing such a bad job after all.

Anyhow, the kids were practicing a dialogue when I heard a knock on the door. I looked through the small glass window and saw the school principal peering in at me. Awesome! She’s going to witness my teaching greatness! The other times she had stopped by my room, the kids were all over the place and I was trying not to cry. But instead of coming in, she motioned me over to the door. This was not a good sign. I didn’t know what was happening but I remember thinking: Please don’t fire me. Please don’t tell me someone died. Please don’t fire me.

I put on a brave face and stepped backwards out of the classroom, following the first rule of teaching middle school: Never look away from your students. (In case you’re curious, the second rule is: Wear high-collared shirts so you don’t flash the students when you lean over their desks.) So I was craning my neck awkwardly sideways to look at the principal and that’s when I saw the two police officers standing behind her. The principal spoke first. “There was a hang-up call to 911. Did someone dial 911 from this room?” She glanced questioningly at the two boys sitting cross-legged on the floor. Then she looked at me with both eyebrows raised as she noticed the classroom phone ajar on the floor beside them.

The truth is that I don’t even remember what happened after that moment. I didn’t get fired, but I also didn’t think that I could ever become a good teacher. At the end of that year, I decided to quit teaching. But as it turned out, quitting isn’t a life plan. After you quit you need to do something else and I hadn’t figured the “something else” part out. So I moved out of Manhattan and was living at home when my dad (who is also a teacher) got his school to offer me a job teaching in a summer program. Since I had just spent the last of my money on Chanel lipstick and a trip to Panama, I took the job.

They only needed me for a couple of weeks, but it was long enough to remind me why I had become a teacher in the first place. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, clear the next several hours from your schedule, Google “inspirational teacher movie” and make some popcorn. If you don’t get a little teary-eyed, then you probably should not go into education.) That September, I put on a high-collared shirt and started my second school year as a teacher. If only by process of elimination based on my first year, I was starting to have some pretty good ideas about how to manage a class and teach, so thankfully my second year was much less eventful than my first year had been.

I’m told that as a kid, one thing I said a lot was “I can’t wait all this time.” It didn’t matter what I was waiting for, or how long the wait was, I didn’t want to wait for it. I am still terrible at waiting, but I’ve realized that impatience isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When I was a first year teacher, I didn’t wait for them to get better. I tried something new every day, and eventually I started to figure out what worked. For me, learning to teach was, and still is, a series of actions: Try. Fail. Reflect. Revise.

I love a metaphor, so here it is: I had a vision when I started teaching, just like when I started to build my table. Teaching well, like building a good table, takes more time and hard work than I could have imagined. It’s messy and time-consuming, but for me trial and error are fundamental to being both a teacher and an artist. And if that ever stops being the case, well, that’s when I’ll know that it’s really time to quit.