Here's what I did this week!

I started Summer Session B this week - trying to cram in my required courses so that there's not too much to think about when I start my student teaching in September. I am taking Youth Cultures, which sounded fun, and Education and the Aesthetic Experience, which sounded...impenetrable. Apparently, the title also confuses my professor - a crazy Italian phd student: we spent nearly the entire two-hour class period last night discussing the definitions of the words "education" and "experience." If we ever get through "and" and "aesthetic," I'll let you know what the class is about.

Youth Cultures might get fun once we slog through all the Piaget and other old-timey theorists of adolescence (of yore). Or it might remain boring. Even though we have, so far, had the great pleasure of watching both a Katy Perry music video and a clip of High School Musical in class, this class mostly blows it vast potential for awesomeness by serving as a forum for our mumbly old British professor's proofs that he is cool. He namechecks people like Joanna Newsom and talks a lot about Twilight (like, a lot. He even made us read a chapter for homework - much more painful than the theory reading.).

Like I said, I have faith this class will improve: our midterm is to write a one-page paper analyzing a tween show. For now, though, the most fun I've had was writing a "reaction" to our first set of assigned readings. We had about 200 pages to do for the first class (hello, dude - Summer Session!), including an article called "Nation of Wimps," which basically whined and moaned about how Boomer parents are all like this, except, you know, with children and not weimaraners. I have excerpted below because I think what I wrote is kind of funny and I'm really lazy:

And then we get to today’s youth: mollycoddled, weak, depressed, unable to grow up because parents won’t let them. Where is the dashing, roguish youth of our past? Where are there witticisms and their wild schemes? Why do we have to worry more about depression now than masturbation? And why do we keep teaching them in much the same way, even when parenting and childhood are “evolving” at alarming rates?

I put “evolving” in quotations because writer of “Nation of Wimps” seemed under the impression that these changes were RENDING THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY (dun dun dunnnnn). And, sure, I am as annoyed by those “but I’m a hip parent”-parents, or, worse, “but I’m still a kid”-parents, as anyone. And, yes, I do think kids have a much more skewed vision (and version) of reality than I did growing up. They do need to fail and fall down and feel sad every once in a while, but I think most will figure out how to do that eventually, no matter how much hothouse parenting they are subjected to.

It may take longer - stretching into that horrible thing called “extended adolescence,” which is really just “30 year-olds wearing cargo shorts and binge drinking instead of GETTING IT TOGETHER ALREADY BECAUSE OMG YOU ARE 30 AND MY PARENTS HAD 2 KIDS AND REAL JOBS BY THE TIME THEY WERE YOUR AGE.” (Like, does anyone else just flip out every time they see that Verizon commercial that starts out, “Today you went from dude to dad,” because I always yell at my TV that you should probably stop being a “dude” and start being a “responsible man” way before an actual, living, breathing thing pops out of your lover’s womb.) Anywayyyy, most kids, as I think the article pointed out, are aware of being over-parented and don’t like it, so we have to have faith that they will, sooner or later, rebel - i.e., figure out how to fail and grow on their own.

And if kids and childhood are forever changed - if they don’t entirely bounce back - well, maybe that’s okay too. Our society doesn’t attribute the same values to the same life skills as it once did. We still want to see assertiveness and leadership, but we are also in a decade of cooperation, groupthink and mash-up. When the article complains that children are more “herd-minded,” I think, well, why can’t we call it “hive-minded”? The ability to go with the flow and work as a team isn’t a weakness.

And then I go on and on about how it's probably okay that we're not raising, like, Warrior-Kings of Blood Vengeance because that's not really how the world works anymore. And my whole class probably thinks I'm a crazypants annoying person because I bashed out 3 pages on readings that none of the cool kids even did. I really wanted to write a disclaimer at the top to let them know I have a really long commute and forgot to bring anything else to do, but I thought that would probably make me sound even crazier.

The upside to cultivating a persona as "class crazyperson" is that I can yell at the professor about his lameness and probably also talk a lot about Adventure Time - because there is nothing crazier than that show. I'm thinking about writing my midterm about it, so you'll probably see my analysis up here when I once more get too lazy to post original writings.

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.

First class

My first class starts in about 2.5 hours (not that I'm nervously counting down or anything). It's a big, mean, double-whammy of a class -- 4 hours long and really two classes combined -- "Teaching of Writing" and "Writing Non-fiction."

Teaching of writing I'm cool with. I need to know how to do that. Writing non-fiction I am less cool with. From what I can tell, it's a lot of writing about yourself and your feelings and attempting to make some sort of "breakthrough" as a writer. I'm not saying I don't need the help; if you are reading this you know very well that I could use about a billion classes on improving my writing.

The thing is, I don't really like feelings. I don't like to talk about mine, and I definitely don't like having to react and respond to other people's. I think I'm an empathetic person -- friends can come to me with their problems and feel pretty safe that I will try to see things their way -- but, between you and I, it's hard! I usually have no idea why people feel the way they do or act the way they act; they baffle me. A two hour feelings assault masquerading as a class sounds terrifying.

The worst part: even if I make it out of there without having offended anyone and having learned something, I am 98% sure that, when I start teaching, I still will not understand why middle schoolers act the way they do.