Friday, or, Signs I Need a Therapist


I’m tired.

I am sitting in a mountain of papers that I can’t possibly keep up with and can’t meaningfully grade. Even if it was graded meaningfully with prolonged comments on their writing or their ideas they’d just look at the grade and demand to rewrite it or throw it away on their way out the door (my favorite). There is another mountain waiting to be copied. Technology is the solution. Make a game. Let them use their phone. Go paperless without computers to go paperless. What would that fix? Would they magically start reading on a screen instead of reading a book?

I’m racing to a finish line for a state test that measures minimum competency..  When the test is done, babysit. Babysit 160 kids who have been programmed to believe that school ends in mid-May. They’ve been raised on this, so why should they think differently?

My students are apathetic and sometimes rude. There’s always random kids running or yelling in the hall. They aren’t ever yelling nice things. There’s no respect for anything—other people’s things, ideas, property, time, you name it. It’s a whole society going down the shitter. Maybe we got the president we deserve.

My students are addicted to their phones. I’m no better.  My colleagues keep bringing in sugary, carby garbage (Cookies! Cake! Candy!) to work and I eat it because I’m tired and it’s there and it is an escape from the shittiness that is my classroom.

There is no learning in my classroom. There is no joy. There is just the pushing of paper and the checking of phones. The emails about student anxiety for work not done-how can you be anxious when standards become lower each year? The enabling. The nonsense.

If I try to inject some life or interest into what I’m doing it’s met with blank stares and disdain, so I increasingly don’t put that out there anymore. It’s like showing off a prized possession and it’s dismissed as stupid or lame or meaningless. Paris Climate accords? The rise of China? The FBI vs. Apple on your phone? Not relevant. Not interesting. It’s not a meme. It’s not a gif. It’s not a tweet.  

I’m tired.

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