Every day with 14, 15 and 16 year olds is a new adventure. I go through many emotions on a daily basis, from anger, to annoyance, to happiness, to embarrassment. Within in a 50 minute class period, I experienced all four of those emotions.
Anger: We are reading Of Mice and Men, and chapter 6 (the very last chapter) is a HUGE scene. I've asked the students not to read ahead so we can read the chapter together. And I've asked them not to tell their classmates the ending if they already know. One student, who is one of my daily annoyances, decided to shout out the ending to the entire class. As it was completely silent, he shouted, "George shoots Lennie in the head!" I was furious.
Annoyance: I have a football player who tries to compensate for not being very smart with comedy. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a big joke to him, and when his classmates laugh at his lame jokes, it only eggs him on. He was on a roll today with lame comment after lame comment. I paired them up to work in groups, and he decided to try to entertain rather than do the work assigned to him. When I called him out on it, he made a lame comment about how I always pick on him. I was so annoyed I said, "That's because you're always making smart-ass, uneducated comments. You don't think before you speak." I think he was so surprised I said ass that he shut his trap and didn't say another word.
Happiness: In this same class, I have a student who is failed. He's had an F since the first week of class, and he's done very little to try to improve. However, he is really enjoying Of Mice and Men and is actually reading it. Today he came up and showed me all his homework (early) and asked for the next set of questions so he could get a head start on it. I was so happy to see him trying.
Embarrassment: One of the characters in Of Mice and Men is Curly. He is the only married man in the book, and his description says that he wears a glove full of Vaseline in order to keep his hand smooth for his wife. Ummmm...RACY! I blushed when I was reading it. Today we were talking about Curly and some of his characteristics. We were finishing our discussion of Curly when a student raised his hand. "Ms. Nichols, why does Curly wear a glove with Vaseline on his left hand? I don't get it." I immediately turned bright red and began to stutter. I had no idea what to say. So I avoided the issue. I said, "Ummm, well, if you don't know the answer to that question, then you don't need to know. I should not be the one to tell you that. AND we're moving on..." Every student began to whisper, trying to figure out what it meant. One boy goes, "Oh, I know what it means," and he did a gesture behind his friend's back. I have no idea what he did because I made sure we moved on. Gosh, that was awkward!
That was all in just 50 short minutes. It was an interesting day to say the least.
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