I wish I could be even half the teacher my students sometimes expect me to be. I mean, some of the crap they expect me to know! Like why Roman numerals are so jacked up. I don't know! Or the things they expect me to remember. Like when a kid asks me what his grade is, as though I've spent the previous night memorizing the grades and missing assignments for all 172 of my students. Well, your daily average is a 72.4% because I never received your homework from last Tuesday, but fortunately, you did well on the test we took a couple of weeks ago, missing only questions #8 and #39, giving you a cumulative average of 84.7%, which, of course, rounds up to an 85. Well done!
Like this morning, three minutes before 1st period, one of my students plops down a 30-page opus for some marketing competition and asks if I have time to proofread it for her by tomorrow. Just some suggestions to make it better. Of course, anything for my favorite student! And then, and this is my favorite part of the story, she comes back after first period to see if I've had a chance to look at it. As of right now, it's still sitting on my desk and I'm sitting on my couch. I'm sorry, I just didn't have time to get to it.
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3 comments:
Hey that's the same thing that happened to me! However, because I'm awesome, I actually edited the opus and have it ready to give back in the morning. Yeah, that's right, I'm the most awesomest teacher ever!
An English teacher, that's who. One that likes to edit in his "free time," evidently.
And then there's the non-English teacher who HATES editing because she's so dang meticulous and perfection-driven, and she too received said opus from an expectant group of students, which left her editing for painstaking hours and hours on end, so much so that she ran her pen completely out of ink, and required a hand massage upon completion, and she's not sure how the Englishers do it all the time, but she feels that her opus is now going to kick some major ass at State, and perhaps even at Internationals, and if a sentence this long and comma-filled were in her paper, she would have edited the hell out of it, which is why she has no more energy or care to correct her own grammatical mistakes, or maybe she's just rebelling...
Apol for the late comment. I've only just discovered your site. It's good.
As a former teacher, I can empathise [Australian spelling]. I once had an eager Miss bring me five different drafts of her Steinbeck essay, Monday through Friday, until I just sat her down and gave her a five-minute rapid-fire lecture about exactly what I expected re. characters, symbolism etc and then sent her to the tuckshop (cafeteria) to get my lunch. She was a good kid and I hated to be even mildly harsh, but she got the message.
Cheers,
Francis
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