My husband has been a teacher for 18 years. This is the beginning-of-school motto our family lives by.

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My husband is about to start his 19th year of teaching, our eldest is starting 7th grade, and our youngest is starting 1st grade. In our family's collective decades of experience, the one motto we try to embrace at the beginning of each school year is that everything is variable. Most of our parent friends try to control for all the variables — school, teachers, and sometimes even friends or classmates — and we've learned that it rarely works as intended.