The Story of My Life

This week is "Parents in School" week.  Parents are invited to attend some of their students' classes.  A parent can come for part of a class or multiple classes and is provided with lunch.  The custodians give the teachers extra chairs in their classrooms, and the administration urges the teachers to make it a positive experience for everyone.  Only two parents planned to attend my class, and one came today.  

   

I was worried, let's be honest.  I did not know whose parent was coming, just that one would be there.  The class he/she would attend is my rowdiest, hardest, most out-of-control.  I refer to them (sometimes affectionately) as my "runaway class."  Both possible meanings (that they resemble runaway horses or that they make me want to run far, far away some days) are equally applicable to this class.  I usually end this class feeling like a terrible teacher and an idiot.  Sometimes I'm so angry I could cheerfully throw a desk across the room and I spend time in the car on the way home giving my steering wheel the lectures I wish I could give the offending students.  Other times I put my head on my desk and cry.  I have referred three people from this class to the principal's office, one has been moved to alternative school, and four have had detention with me in the last 48 hours.

   

So, into this den of pubescent energy was going to come a parent.  Most likely, this parent would belong to one of the quiet, over-achieving "good" kids that sit through this class with pained expressions on their faces and frequent eye-rolls when people won't "shut-up."  This parent would get to watch me take 90 minutes to fail to teach this class.  In other words, I was not excited to have this parent come.  

   

As the students filtered in, I tried to prepare.  The assignment was on the board, I had planned activities that would give them as little opportunity to be jerks as possible, and the room was neat and orderly.  One of my best students strolls in and announces, a little embarrassed, "My mom's coming today."  Of course, it would be her mother.  This girl's approach to life is maximum effort, least wasted time, and she is one of the most frustrated of the eye-rollers.  I could just picture her equally determined and put-together mother sitting in the back of my classroom with an expression of dismay and disappointment on her face as I struggled to control the boisterous youths that the government had confined to desks.  

   

The dreaded mother arrived, looking meek, but that could be just the exterior.  I taught my lesson.  In less than ten minutes the class owed time after the bell, and I had had to shout over them multiple times to be heard, asking them to quiet down.  Things went better during the reading, even this class enjoys being read to.  While the rest were working on grammar worksheets, I pulled my detention servers aside one-by-one.  I thanked the ones that were showing improvement, and reminded a couple of the goals for improvement we had set, mentioning specific behaviors that were cropping up that we had agreed would not be a problem again.  After I got the class to the computer lab, the students were separated enough that this mother and her daughter could focus on the project research, instead of the antics of my wild horses on the other side of the room.  

  

Half an hour before the bell, the mother came up to tell me she had to go pick up her kindergarten student.  Here it came, the disappointed look, the shake of the head.  I thanked her for coming, and she told me that ... she appreciated me and that I had her sympathy.  She said she wasn't sure she could do what I did.  "I had forgotten what junior high was really like...I've never seen such disrespect in my whole life!  I just wanted to go up and strangle a few of them.  I wanted to ask them if their parents knew how they were behaving."  

   

Relief flooded through me that as I assured her that this was my rowdiest class, and that not every class was like that.  She left shaking her head, but not at me.  She wasn't going to go home and tell her husband that I was a terrible teacher and then call the principal to tell him the same.  She left thinking, "Wow, junior high teachers have to put up with A LOT."  And, as much as I love my students, she's right.  I know I'm not a terrible teacher, and I know that these students are just young people trying to get what fun they can out of adolescence, but the fact still stands that I put up with a lot.  

   

Here's a sample of my favorite one-liners that my students have seen fit to announce to the room.  Most of these happen during class, sometimes in the middle of one of my sentences, or when I ask if there are any questions.

   

"You're cupboards are dirty, woman!" Luckily, this was after school, because he would have been in the principal's office if it had been in session.

"Why don't you just do it for me?"

"You hate me 'cause I'm Asian!"  This one I heard about three times a day for a while.

"Can I go play in the snow?"  This one was asked every five minutes at full voice during a lecture on pronouns.

Me, "Are there any questions? Yes--"  "I'd like to take a free pass on this."  Me: "Haha. Any other questions. Yes, again--" Same student: "I'd like to take a free pas on this."  "There are no free passes.  Any other questions? Yes--"  Same student: "It's time for me to go play outside."

   

"He said he hates me because I'm Asian!" Said in the middle of an explanation of a project while pointing to a student I'm sure has never said that many words the whole time he's been in my class.

"I'm bored!"

"This sucks!"

"This class is gay."

   

I do love my job.  Really.  But this is just from three students.  In the same class.  And just a few of the most memorable one-liners.  It's wearing on me.  I'm getting so I start each day with less and less patience.  I'm getting ruder and ruder to those students, because they are such jerks to me and those around them.