March 2009: Big Babies

At the tennis match yesterday, one of our assistant principals came to support us. We struck up conversation as our students played.

“You come to see that they’re just big babies,” she said, smiling. “They think they’re grown, but they’re not. They just want some recognition and to be called by name, like two-year-olds [do],” she said. She told me that my most severe troublemaker (a repeat offender who gives me mental ulcers) comes to her for ‘counseling.’

I believe it’s true – and ominously so – because today, when I had to leave my rowdy 8^th block to go to a tennis match at 2:45, this troublemaker replied to my ‘threat’ to send people to Ms. W (the assistant principal) with, “Can I go? I can really go to her?” He was eager to go to the principal’s office! How odd!

I wish I had the capacity to see my students as big babies. Currently, I am in a little rut where their petty behavior gets to me in a terrible way. Take C.L., a girl who said, after I left for tennis, “Is she crying?” This response got me so indignant that I stomped back in the classroom and demanded, “what did you say? No, I am not, thank you very much, I am going to tennis. You don’t know how to respect a teacher.” Ugh, looking back on that terrible scene of leaving that huge class in disarray, and acting like a two-year-old myself, I felt anything but peace in Ms. W’s presence at the afternoon game.

Ms.W said that students will ‘rat’ on teachers who don’t do their job. “They know who is and who isn’t teaching them. They know which teachers are always dragging on them. And I can tell in a second what a teacher’s intentions are.”

That got me in a mental knot all over again. I worried that I don’t really love some of these students, and am inept to show them care over the long-haul because I simply can’t stand them. K.S. and C.L., for instance. They’re just miserable to have in the classroom and I wish they could be suspended. (What a terrible thing to say!) They demand so much energy and end up controlling me.

Since I am getting all my worries out now, let me add one more: I am afraid that I am not equipping my students with anything special. When they leave my room, I will have added nothing remarkable to their repertoire of abilities or hopes. When I hear or think about other teachers at my school and what they offer their students – a pristinely silent, orderly room, a refuge from the rest of the school’s madness; a motherly wisdom that lectures students in their social blunders; an easygoing, innovative, cheerful father. These are three teachers that come to mind on the English hall who have accomplished much as teachers. I am just consumed with self-doubt sometimes. Someday, maybe I will have sufficient love for my students, and strict enough discipline that troublemakers don’t phase me. Until then…