14 April 2010

Help me understand the logic

This is what I'm working with:

  • A teacher told students to double space their paper. One student turned in a paper that was single-spaced, but typed with a word, then two spaces, then a word, then two spaces.  I teach high school.  Really makes me wonder who the kid was.  Is it a student who has never done an assignment before?  Was the kid sitting as s/he typed just pissed off at the teacher thinking of how stupid and pointless it was to have to focus on hitting the space bar twice between each word?
  • One of my athletes had to miss the last weekend track meet because her sister was coming in town.  The school is in St. Louis County.  Her sister goes to Webster University - also in StL.  She said her sister doesn't live at home and it was going to be a big deal for her when she came over.  I'm sure she spent every minute that she would have been competing catching up with her sister that clearly does not want to keep in contact if it is that big a deal for her to come home from within a 20-mile radius from her parents' home.
  • I saw an old, really good friend at a recent track meet in Festus, MO.  As we stood catching up, an athlete came and proceeded to tell me that as he was running his race, he felt his lower leg break in half.  This while he is just finished jogging up the hill to me and is standing on both of his legs with no looks of intense pain, and no bone marrow dripping from where his leg snapped in half.
  • One of the students in my school got picked to be Made by MTV.  Pretty cool, especially since she is an excellent student.  When the MTV lady came by today to do some interviews with students, of course the most annoying person in my classes was there and he wanted to pretend he is her boyfriend.  Because, I'm sure, with all the taping the show will do of her before May, they will not get actual footage of her talking with her real boyfriend.  Is it horrible of me to hope that the footage of him gets cut from the show?  (If her episode makes the cut)
  • A guy who stays on the same street as me has been parked on one side of the street for a long time.  One of those really big older American cars with custom paint and some expensive rims.  No door handle on the outside -- that would mess up the smooth exterior look.  He moved the car to the other side of the street.  I guess he was keeping it on the one side of the street so that everyone wouldn't see that he had rims only on one side of the car.  The other side just had regular hub caps.  Hopefully he will save up some money and get the other pair of rims.
There is so much more, but thinking about it all at one time makes my head hurt and makes me want to scream or something.  Perhaps another day I will share more of my youngsters' antics

2 comments:

  1. The rims thing is common. They're pretty expensive, too, the nice ones. A lot of young guys take pride in them and think rims are babe magnets; important at that age, ya know?

    The kid who double between words sounds like he has Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or has one of the Autism spectrum disorders, or never did a paper in his life. Or he could be just a smart azz who asserting a little independent thought in the best way he could.

    The MTV thang, well, everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame.

    Kids are kind of cool, at least up to a point, in that they haven't become cookie cutter products of a cookie cutter society, and you get to see what real humans are like in the raw. Some of it's sweet, some of it's scary.

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  2. Very true, Kit.

    I think that is one of the things I enjoy about teaching and living around young people. They are entertaining in their quest for individuality and attention.

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I share my thoughts and would love to read your thoughts, too.