1. We admit that we are powerless over our grading and planning and reading and quite incapable of keeping up, that our lives have become unmanageable.

2. We’ve come to believe there better be a higher power that can restore us to sanity or become a Zen Buddhist so we can just accept insanity as the natural state of things, noting our insanity as it wafts through our minds.

3. We make a decision to turn our lives over to our students, to accept that we have no life other than our students and to forget about dates, spouses, housecleaning, and paying bills on time until summer.

4. We make a searching moral inventory of our failings as a teacher, which is not difficult, there are so many.

5. We document our failings, then burn the document for CYA purposes, keep our moral inventories to ourselves lest we get sued.

6. We are entirely ready to have the public education system remove all our flaws through any of 437, 531 different educational fads, such as incentive pay, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, 431 standardized tests administered each year, vouchers, etc. knowing that no one ever knows what happens when we shut the door and teach anyway.

7. We humbly ask God to remove all our shortcomings. Seriously.

8. We make a list of all the thousands of students we have harmed by our shortcomings and are willing to make amends if they will, for all the Valium prescriptions they’ve driven us to.

9. We make direct amends whenever possible, though the only ones we’ll ever hear from are those whose lives we’ve touched the most. The rest will use us as cocktail party fodder.

10. We’ll continue to take moral inventory whenever possible, including a moral inventory on behalf of our colleagues and administrators, just in case they need help making theirs.

11. Seek through prayer and meditation constant contact with our higher power, whatever we understand that to be, without which we will not make it to June or find the fortitude to come back in the fall.

12.Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we carry our message to fellow teaching addicts everywhere in the hopes of saving our profession from addiction, burn-out, and politicians ,and lend each other the strength to face our tasks one day at a time.