Feeling the Love

I had the most interesting day on Tuesday. I let the kids finish their poster projects, and about one-fourth of the class was in chaos in each period. I didn’t mind; they were still working. I shall share the highlights of the day:

Block A: My supposed future white supremacist student was a little off task. I have to admit: he intimidates me sometimes. He has never come up to talk to me, and whenever I talk to him, he has the usual apathetic sigh. I often wonder what he thinks of me, given my “minority” background. At the end of class, he approached me and said, “Hey, Ms. G… You have to see my ecology project.” He proceeded to show me his display board that had information on plants and his hate for a particular Sierra Club tree-hugger. The board also featured his favorite hobby: dirt bike riding. How is this related to ecology? It was all about the desert and how people affect it by partying and riding in it. Although I paid attention to everything he said, in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Wow, he’s talking to me… and in a friendly and intelligent way.” I may have been judgmental when I thought he was a future white supremacist, but I still wonder about the drawings of skulls, his high pride for Americanism, sentences he wrote about Nazis, and his sketches of the Confederate flag.

Block C: The slut is actually working and participating in class. I almost had a golden moment with her. While I was working with my A+ student to improve her essay, the slut came up to me and said, “Check it out.” Usually, when she says that, she would show me something to shock me. Instead, she showed me an image of a medieval coat of arms. “This is my family’s coat of arms. I found it on the Internet,” she said. Like my first student from Block A, although I was interested at the family coat of arms, I was more surprised that she was showing me something new, something not for shock value, and that she approached me willingly and with friendly intentions. She and I do not get along, and we both know this, yet I felt that this was one golden opportunity. I wanted to seize the moment and talk more about the coat of arms, her Irish heritage, and maybe even leave the semester with a positive note. I was well on my way to hooking her in and getting to know her in a more positive light, when all of a sudden, my A+ student commands my attention: “That’s not even school related. We have two minutes and my essay is more important!”

Damn those A+ students. Always so demanding.