This past week Thursday all the sophomores took the ACT Plan test (like the PSAT). I was assigned to administer the test to the more...boisterous class of 10th graders. After taking over an hour to bubble ("Are you interested, not interested, or slightly interested in learning how to build a bird house?" + 70 other items and etc.), we settled into 2 hours of silence.
Yes, silence. You read that correctly. Apparently, when things reach a certain level, they can take them seriously. But that's not what I'm here to say.
When I got past the mind-boggling boredom of walking around a room watching students take standardized tests in silence for 2 hours, or perhaps because of that boredom, as I reflected on the situation, watching my students take the test, this feeling rose up inside of me.
Fondness.
I know that that doesn't really make any sense, but in that moment I felt fondness for my generally most troublesome class (this would be the class that I write about, for example, throwing crackers at me). They were doing what they were supposed to do, I felt like I was being a real teacher, and they asked me questions as if they needed me.
So the beauty of being a teacher touched me this week in the most unexpected situation. I realized that I am involved in the lives of all of these students. I am their teacher, whether they like me or not, and I am here to guide them and support them. In what other profession do you get to form relationships with so many seemingly random people? Public education - it serves anyone. There are no requirements past being a certain age and living in the city. And that makes our shared humanity seem so real.
Then of course, the next day in the same class, I was forced to dictate notes to a student to write on the board so that I could view the entire class at once, because that is the only way to prevent them from throwing things at each other. (Earlier in the week a girl got hit in the face with a jawbreaker and required ice. Week after Halloween ups the ante in the throwing wars.)
And then I got to leave the classroom to hang out with a friend and eat Chinese food and, for the first time, go to a drive-in theater, where we munched 90% off Halloween candy and snuggled in blankets against the cold. And now here I am Sunday night again, after we watched the entire first season of How to Get Away with Murder on Netflix yesterday and today, blogging, and feeling Monday morning creeping up on me. But maybe one more dish of ice cream first.
Side note on the throwing wars of the boisterous sophomores: One day this week one of the students from the boisterous class was in my calmer sophomore class during break, and he asked me which of the sections was better behaved. At first I thought he was joking, but he kept asking, so I said, "Well, this class never had paper and toilet paper throwing wars in my class, they don't start dance parties in the corners of my room, and they don't get up and run around the room yelling."
"Oh," he said, "Well...we don't do that that often! Only like...once a day!"
On an even less related side note that connects in terms of a lack of concept of numbers, today the children's message at church was about giving. The speaker started by asking if the children would rather find a dollar or a penny on the ground, and then why. "I would rather find a dollar," one boy said, "because it's a lot more. A dollar is like FOUR pennies." At this point someone must have whispered to him the truth, because after a pause he shouted, "A hundred pennies! Oh my God!"
Cheers,
Anneke
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