It’s really amazing how much teachers bitch about work. I haven’t held a full-time job other than teaching, so I’m wondering if other people at other professions complain as much as teachers do to each other. Every day at lunch, it’s one thing about this student, another story about another student, this one said this, that one said that. Every other day an older teacher mentions, with the requisite pining in their voice, about the decline of students’ attention spans and the rise in the instant-gratification, all-about-me attitude. Nobody ever talks about anything else. I’m wondering if it’s just the teachers here or if it’s everybody everywhere. Is anybody happy at their job???
Conversation with two students:
Girl 1: “I wanted to wear this skirt so I look good, but now I’m freezing.”
Me: “You’re a teenage girl. You don’t have to dress like that to get guys.”
Girl 2: “Tell me about it.”
Writing because I have 20 minutes until the next class and I’m bored of grading labs. So a few random things that happened.
There’s a education student who needs to observe a certain number of classroom hours for his program. So he’s been in my class the past few days. He’s a bit older than me, maybe 30′s or 40′s, so he doesn’t look like a student. All of my students immediately want to know why the strange man is watching our class. We came up with this story that, because of the budget cuts next year, a certain number of teachers have to be fired and he’s grading teachers to see who gets the axe. As much as my students give me a hard time, it’s refreshing to see them behave like little angels and tell this guy how they can’t fire me! One student, after finding out we were joking, said, “Ok, now I can go back to not paying attention.” At least she listened to save my job.
On a more disturbing note, one of my students came to me two days ago, wondering out loud why all the boys were bothering her during class. I took one look at her and said, “Honey, look what you’re wearing.” Come on! Her chest is falling out of this shirt and she wonders why? I thought girls did this on purpose so guys would look at them. And when I say “them” I mean the girls, not “the girls”. Anyway, one of the guys bothering her then said to me that he wished he could show cleavage so girls would check him out. He said that he’d want to show (I’m not making this up) a little bit of shaft, but not the head, cause that’d be like showing nipple. His pickup line: “There’s two more inches where that came from.” This is the time where I try not to laugh and try to be annoyed at his language because, you know, I’m the teacher and the adult. But I lost this time and burst out laughing. How could you not?
