Oh, so THIS is when the crying starts

In my first official student teaching class (aka "talk about your feelings in the evening when you leave student teaching" class), our professor spent a lot of time describing just how much of our personal time this semester would be spent weeping. She did this very cheerily, splicing in a lot of giggles and many instances of the phrase "hot mess," so I didn't give much credit to what she said.

I am not a crier. At least, not for good reasons, like "he was mean to me." I cry at slow motion sports montages and the end of What Not to Wear and occasionally at weddings. I do not just come home at the end of a long day and "have a good cry." I have a beer. And that's that - until today.

Today, I feel like I might go home and cry. The boys were not just bad - they were EVIL. It started in math class. I foolishly - SO FOOLISHLY - decided to go observe them away from the iron grip of my cooperating teacher. I'd heard they were particularly bad in this class, and my coop had absolutely nothing nice to say about the math teach's classroom management capabilities. So I took my little observation notebook, sat down, and watched them LOSE THEIR DAMN MINDS.

Boys were yelling across the classroom, drumming, screaming, walking around, shooting hoops with the recycling, leaving class, smacking each other...a very different show from what they put on in my coop's class. Eventually, it got so bad, I felt the need to jump in - my second misstep. I could control one at a time, but no more, and I don't think that approach really earned me any respect from the 15 other kids who continued to run around screaming while I had serious chats with their classmate.

I asked one of the little devils straight up, "What is the deal with this class? Why are you being SO BAD?" He said, "She's not strict enough. We don't respect her." Well. Okay. Now I know what the problem is, but how do I fix it? Respect isn't something that I automatically command. I am young and inexperienced and small and today when I was shoving boys around, yeah, I bossed them, but I was shaking while I did it.

I guess I carried some of the sheen of utter failure from that class back to my coop's room. The same class was in there - totally well-behaved and silent for her, but every time she stepped out of the room or turned her back, it was back to the old tricks. I am proud to say that it did not get as crazy as the math room - meaning I fall somewhere between awesome and horrible on the classroom management scale, but there were three that brought it to the brink.

Somehow, these three (particular troublemakers in a class full of them) got it into their heads that I was tattling on them. Because I have nothing better to do with my time than write down everything little crappy thing they do and show it to my coop, the enforcer. They think my student teaching notebook is my ledger of offenses. I have no idea how this happened. None of them got in trouble when we came back to the class of reason and silence. Even when my coop pressed me for the gossip of the other room, I didn't name names (except to tell her the 3 that had been good, and the one that had gone missing). So now I am "the snitch" - not the most respectful thing to call your student teacher.

Every time I had to tell someone to stop talking or get to work, the three troubles would say, "You'd better do it, before she tattles on you!" And I let it get to me. I mean, what do you do in that situation? Ignore it? Maybe if you're their classmate, but a teacher can't let them call her those things, right? Right? It really hurt my feelings. I've been with them for 2.5 weeks, and I've been pretty cool with them, I thought. I'm not weak, I try not to be too tough with them or yell at them for no reason, I help them when they ask. It was a terrible shock to realize that those things - in the moment at least - did not matter to them. I felt transported back to my own terrible middle school - just feeling so terribly awkward and judged and unliked for no reason that I could really pinpoint. They made me feel ugly and small and dumb even when I thought I was so over that. And I felt like crying.

If anyone reads this, I know what they'll say - it takes time to build respect, you can't win them all over, 8th graders are demented, you can't let them get to you, blahblahblah. I know, and I'm trying to shake it off. It's hard, though, to have a first day of failure at the hands of people you've invested yourself in. I know there are more to come, and I hope I'll get a little hardened.