For me, crazy is not a far drive from where I live. So it is quite easy for me to get there. But my kind of crazy is usually a pleasant kind - not the angry kind. But sometimes, in a rare blue moon, I can break. I am patient and can put up with a lot. I was well trained by my brothers to be patient in adversity. Yet there are some things that every teacher goes through that makes them eventually want to scream. Here is a condensed list:
1) Tapping. Tapping pencils, hands, feet or anything else against a desk. This is a classic trademark of an ADD or ADHD kid and when you have a room of 30 of them, man, it gets annoying.
2) Paper torn out of a spiral notebook. It may seem trivial, but when you are stacking papers and that one with the snowy frayed edge won't mesh with the others, it sticks out at angles and drags papers with it. Bother!
3) Inappropriate questions shouted out at inappropriate times. For example: "Ms. Dempsey, why aren't you married?" or "Where did you get your shoes?" shouted out while I am mid-sentence explaining how to solve one step equations.
4)Lies. Arggh, I say. I hate when a kid lies to me and then lies about lying. I once had a kid cheat on a test and then say he didn't copy from his neighbor. The question was to make up a word problem involving d=rt and the kid copied one from his neighbor...it had the neighbor's name in the problem.
I think I'll stop writing this blog, because it's starting to feel very negative and negativity was going to be number 5. I do love my job and I do love the kids that make me go over the edge sometimes. I just wish you could have seen the kid in one of my classes who literally acted like a monkey after he was done with his test. His hands were shaking above his head and he was swinging his head back and forth and tapping his feet. He was acting this way because I asked him to stop tapping at least 5 times in a row that day and he knew that if his hands were down, he would tap again. I wish I had had a camera to tape it. I just stared at him and had to laugh...at least he wasn't tapping.
