Bad Teacher

I’ve been  teaching for  about 15 years now and I believe I am generally a good teacher.  But, we all have our bad days.  Today was a really bad day.

I had a class  of 5th graders, and I’m still kind of  getting to know them.  There is one  boy who is clearly better than everybody else at English, but he’s also a bit of a know  it all.  There is one girl who I realized today I had seriously over-rated.  Some good students, some bad.  A typical batch  of 10 year olds.

One kid  , sitting right near the front, had been irritating me from the start of the class.  He wasn’t the  only one who was throwing stuff and punching at the kids around him whenever  he thought I wasn’t looking.  There were four or five boys – and one girl, who I saw as the victim but I realize in retrospect she was probably no such thing.  Anyway, this kid was the most visible, the most blatant, and reminded me the most of myself in the 5th grade – perfectly willing to get caught being an asshole now and again, just to be one of the cool kids.  (I was never one  of the cool kids.  This boy wasn’t, either.)

At any rate, at one  point I decided to check and make sure everybody  in  the  class knew the vocabulary on the board (mother, father, brother, sister, etc…), so I called him and the girl he’d been throwing paper at to the front of the room for a competition.  He did something stupid.  I don’t even remember what.

I gave her permission to whack him with her bag, which she’d been doing all period anyway.  It seemed a bit of light, harmless humor.  Until he started crying.  Then I realized that this tiny little girl had a powerful swing and inside this very soft looking bag, she  had books.

He wasn’t seriously hurt, and stopped crying soon enough, but  I felt guilty about  it for  the rest of the lesson and never really regained control of the class.

I’m usually a good teacher.  I think I’m getting better as a teacher all the time.  But today was definitely not my best day.