Saturday, November 29, 2014

Insult Prone

If you’re a kid, you don’t have to eat the bread crusts on your peanut butter sandwich because they’re ew.

You can talk loudly in the grocery store about needing to go poop, emphasizing it with the doody dance.

And you can insult adults without worrying about hurting their feelings. 

You will, actually, hurt their feelings. It’s just that you don’t worry about it.

There is nothing in this world as critically reviewed as a teacher. It is the only profession, besides parenting, that people who have no training or experience in are allowed to have an opinion.

Every student who can read the English language will tell you, no matter how many copies have sold, how many people have read and liked and alluded and remade it, that this book you’re teaching is complete trash. Miss, I’ve read seven pages and it is sooooo boring. Can’t we read something good?

On the edge of my grammar book someone in a previous year wrote “This class sucks.” Just this week I noticed that someone recently added, “alot".

(Hopefully, said person will not be repeating my class, despite his/her grammar skillz.)

Even if you have 34 students who just love, love, love every second of your class, and eat up your words like adoring face-licking puppies, that one student who yells, “YES! FINALLY!” when the bell rings can ruin the whole day.

I like to make special projects out of students whose mission is to hate me. These are the kids that glare and roll their eyes when everyone else is laughing at my joke. They come see me about their grade and act like I am wasting their time if I try to talk to them. I like to kill ‘em with kindness, in my totally manipulative way. It helps me to remember to like them, too, so it’s not all about my entertainment.  I give them extra attention. I laugh openly when they scowl. I work them into my jokes about what will be reported from class back to parents out of context that night. I super high five them while they reel from the shock because they don’t know what hit ‘em. These are students that just make it part of their persona to hate anything that someone else likes, so I get that. They’re me. I’ve won over more than a few of these guys this way, by the end, so I like to think it works.

There’s a survey that asks students to rate the teacher on a scale of “Never” to “Always” according to about 100 statements. It’s part of the teacher evaluation system and is tied to teacher pay. One of the first ones is:

“This class feels like a happy family.”

Well, if you feel comfortable enough to insult your mother and expect to get a barrage of ruthless teasing in return while your siblings all laugh, I suspect I’ve got near perfect ratings.

1 comment:

jalna said...

Just wanted to let you know that I've been enjoying your recent posts. I look forward to them. Thanks for coming back.