2009-11-05 - 6:58 p.m.
Also dubious given the relative attractiveness of the other staff

I never yell at students. I'm just not a "raise your voice" type of person. Which I've always found a little odd, given that I have quite the temper.

I lost my temper today. I was just sooooo frustrated with the shithead sophomores in my first class. I'd been trying to get them to intelligently discuss this book for a good ten minutes and we'd (meaning me and the 3 kids that were halfway participating) finally stumbled toward one of the points I wanted them to get. We were talking about how people learn and how we learn not by being awesome at everything, but by making mistakes, by failing. We'd hit that point and they were screwing around, talking over me, throwing things, etc and I just blurt out, "You guys know something? If you all could actually learn from failure, you'd be fricking geniuses by now!"

A kid in the front kind of gapes at me and the rest shrug it off. I felt a little bad for calling them all failures but given that the class average on a test this week (for which I'd given them the answers) was a SIXTY-FUCKING-TW0 PERCENT, I feel my outburst was justified.

Argh. I swear, there's like a toxic pond or something out there that they've been drinking out of all their lives. The town I teach in is weird, friends, and I'm leaving it. If not this year, then after next.

My students do surprise me from time to time. I was grading journals today and one of the prompts for them to write about was 10 images they thought of when they thought of their home. I was expecting the normal angsty shit, but there was only one kid out of 47 who did that. The dominating feature of every journal was how warm, loving and filled with laughter their homes are.

Don't get me wrong, it makes me really happy that most of my kids enjoy their home life to the point that they will write rosy journals to me about it. But man, if I had been assigned that journal prompt as a senior? Yikes. I was so stressed out by what was going on at home that I thought of school as my home and I hid in my room any time I did have to be home. And it's not like my life was terrible - sure there were terrible things like the night Quint went nuts and destroyed half the house or the day Quint hit me so hard it dislocated my shoulder or the time my G-ma who was living with us because she had no hip fell down, but mostly, my parents were very good to me. I was told I was loved, I was cared for, provided for, helped, etc. They did tell me in about February of that year that they just couldn't pay much attention to me, what with G-Ma and Psycho!Quint, but they were never abusive, never cruel.

I'm kind of amazed the kids can look past the negatives in their home lives. I know I wouldn't have been able to. I know I didn't - I vented every day in my "senior passages" class, during our daily check-in with the teacher.

Oh, teenagers. They are so weird.

In other news, another English teacher's 7th hour freshman class voted me "hottest teacher in school". Yuck. (I am grossed out, but my competitive nature compels me to mention that I also got that title last year. 2 years running. Oh, the dubious honor)