Will you marry me? [This is Gary, my boyfriend]
I hate you!
Being a policeman
Show up every day? At this hour? [Teaching is not just having a 10 AM class]
For many years, one of my main jobs was to work with college students to get them mentally prepared to become teachers. As I looked at the Time magazine cover article on millennials as parents, I thought of some of experiences that tended to stand out for young, smart, energetic people moving toward being responsible for students, classrooms and learning.
Many students who want to be teachers are female. I am not, so I was surprised to learn how often they had pictures of being adorned by students. It may be more natural for males to expect competition and resistance to authority. I didn't have a great deal of trouble with classroom manners and discipline but I expected some. I didn't expect to be adorned and I was not seeking a warm relation. I was expecting tempers, fatigue, and occasional high spirits, pranks and jokes. I remember the serious and pained face of the 5th grade boy who told me he wasn't feeling well and showed me his vomit on top of our pile of composition paper. I tenderly put my arm around him but he reached out and picked up the rubber fake.
In my experience, the part of teaching that tended to be the most difficult for most students was the negative part. Bosses don't like to fire people and teachers don't like to be bad guys either. However, good sense, good manners and sometimes basic morality can and do get violated in school. The teacher is the main person to spot such problems and put a stop to them. The situation is similar to that of a parent of a teen who has to lay down the law. When the same law has been violated before, a penalty, a grounding, some pain, loss or punishment is called for, but that doesn't make it fun to administer, to stand behind and to enforce.
Whether the young person is 3 or 13, they are quite likely to make their displeasure with pain, loss or punishment very clear. When a youngster says through gritted teeth,"I hate you!", it can hurt the disciplinarian. It is usually counterproductive to say that such a comment hurts, even when it does. Trying to be reasonably friendly after a suitable time with the rules violator may offer a chance to get rebuffed, which can hurt again. In my experience, it is this policing aspect of teaching that is most often difficult to accept and become used to. More so, since we all want kindhearted teachers who appreciate young minds and personalities so we select for the very student teacher who is indeed going to be a little wounded by hatred, temporary or not.
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