Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. Days of the week ARE capitalized, right? Wednesdays make me feel old. This Wednesday I’m especially slow – I feel slow and dispirited, frankly. I’m probably just in the midst of some cycle, or I haven’t eaten the right things, but I feel down. I wonder abut the age mix we have. II find it odd that the Java Mammas open mic has become a place where students and teachers and substitute teachers all mix outside of the school setting. Hell, I’ve never spent so much time in the social circles of 13-17 year-olds. Other than chance encounters I never voluntarily spent time with my students when I was teaching, but maybe my experience wasn’t completely normal.
Hell, I KNOW my experience wasn’t completely normal. Too much blood there.
Melodrama. DEFINITELY been spending too much time with the chemicals in my head skewed.
Parents can be friends or they can be authority figures. Occassionally I’ve seen a family in which it can be had both ways, but they are few and far-between and as often as not more a result of the kid not really needing that much parenting. But being too much a friend to your child undermines your ability to lay down the law when you have to. I think teachers can have a similar conundrum – musicians too, perhaps.
As a teacher, is it more important to remain inviolate and above the human interactions that provide armour chinks and glimpses of our Lives? Can they allow their students those levers? Don’t the walls have to stay up all the time? So what does this do in the open mic setting where social circles cross and some people call you by your first name but you’re still Mr/Miss so-and-so to the student? And can you be silly? Can you be sad? Can you have a good day or a bad day? Is it better for a teacher to be human, to be relatable, to be someone you can almost see as a peer? Or is it more important for them to be inviolate – impossible paragons? And does any student believe in that? I don’t even know.
I really looked up to my teacher and I thought of them as my friends. It was only later that I realized that it didn’t go both ways. I was top of my class in a lot of ways, top grades, the teachers were good at encouraging me and most people respond well to that. They want more of it – praise is addictive and I’d argue that I got enough of it in school that probably on some level it led me to being a performer, craving further adulation. But I know now that some of the teachers that I held most dear don’t remember me, that some of them had five or six classes a day and they’ve taught for 20 years and they had a favourite in every class in every year and so out of the hundreds of students they’ve had over the course of their careers, there’s another hundred kids that were just like me – and though they bent my Life so dramatically and I admire them for it and I’m thankful for it, it was a hard realization to think that I’d never really touched them back.
I’m sure there are exceptions here and there. Most of them would remember me, I’m sure – eventually – but that’s one of the most mysterious of talents. To remember the names and faces of 37 students in a class and 6 classes a day… some of them must stick from year to year, but I wouldn’t remember but a name or two of any of my students and only those because they caused me so much trouble.
And so we are here in a setting where both the teachers and the students come to the same place to relax after school. In both circles some of them are social, some of them sit in the corner and read. Neither appears to be doing their homework, which is kind of interesting.
In any case, I’ve come home tired from MY day at work because even the teachers look young to me and I’ve got no words left in my head and I want someone to just come along and shut it all down.
Good night.
