The Week in Review

On Thursday, another teacher shuffled into my classroom looking entirely beaten down and destroyed. When I looked up, he said, "I hate all teenagers and want them all to die."

"Okay," I said, trying to be supportive.

"Is this a problem, do you think, with my job?"

I tried to console him with my own story from Tuesday, when a soph tried to tell me that I had "made up" the fewer/less grammar rule, that nobody cares about grammar rules, and it doesn't matter if he "speaks good" or not.

Oh, the irony.

When I tried to explain, you know, the fact that LANGUAGES have GRAMMARS so we can communicate with one another as opposed to blabber gibberish nonstop, he asked who made up the rules in the first place.

I should have known better than to spout off about the beginnings of language and communication in 500,000 B.C. with Homo Erectus standing up and grunting.

"Homo ERECTus?" he asked incredulously.

You can imagine how that went over.

Along those lines, today another colleague came into my room, proudly bearing a blue glass bottle with the words, "Bawls: High Caffeine Guarana Soda" etched into it. He handed it to me and said, "One of my senior boys just gave this to me in front of the class and said, 'Hey, Mr. K. Now you're holding my bawls.'"

Nice.

And that's just how the week has been going.