The student fought me at every turn. Off-task. No homeowrk turned in. Little classwork done. Had to listen to me tell him every day to pull his pants up to cover his butt, to turn around and face the front of the room, to stop talking to other students: basically, I was on his back the entire term, trying to get something worthwhile out of him.
And he didn't like it. "Why are you always picking on me?" he asked. He was even belligerent at times; earned a couple of detentions. I may have even taken him outside for a "counseling with student" in the hallway, when the whole class knows he's being chewed out by the teacher for something.
He barely passed, and only because I cared more than he. That 62% was hard-fought.
This year, he calls my name across the quad whenever he sees me, and waves & smiles. He stops off in my room to tell me news about his life: driver's license, car, whatever.
Those are the rules of the game.
3 comments:
Dear Mr. Coulter,
I lost your email address, so im here to invade your one place where students cant find you! (queue maniacal laugh track) These are all individual poems that i constructed after some rather odd observations at night under the waning effects of caffeine.
p.s. I miss your instruction; college professors have nothing on you.
The balloon that once flew so high
That in its deflation
Pretends to be a bowl of embers,
Glowing with all it has left.
A hope to meet just who
Really wears my clothes
Who I am
Or who I want to be
When a look or a touch
Is all you really want,
How do you react
To a hug or a kiss.
How hard is it to practice what you preach,
When you’re the heretic of mediocrity.
How much alienation will you withstand
To be the arbiter of your life’s flow.
I think I now know
Why people drink or eat
When they smoke cigarettes.
Juxtaposition.
If I wanted to avoid the green squiggly line
That appears underneath my writing on word processor,
I would have to write complete sentences
With a subject, verb, and predicate.
(Copy and paste the poem above in a word processor [microsoft office, etc] for a bit of irony.)
If what is as is
Cannot be not as is
Then how do I not know
What is is
If it cannot be not?
(Believe it or not, philosophy text books only make this question more complicated)
Grant!
Took a look at your pic thumb-tacked on the wall behind my desk Friday morning, and wondered what you were up to these days.
Think of the Devil, and the Devil appears… (to paraphrase the old saw).
I can't tell if you need more caffeine, or less, when you write, but it's definitely you: witty, sharp, at times even you're perplexed at what's in your head, and always, with you, a slight whiff of the absurd, like the fragrance of a woman who left the room just before you walked in. I like the whole tone. Life, she is a mystery, no?
Thanks for the compliment. This week I threatened my juniors that I was going to quit high school and go teach college, where the students pay attention (yeah, I know and you know, but they believed me). Some day.
We're comparing the story-telling techniques of writers and film-makers after having read Of Mice and Men: camera angles, music, dialogue, choice of setting, casting choices, arrangement of sequence, facial expression, etc. The first day they whined because I paused the tape twenty times to show them things they'd never noticed before. Now they're taking their own notes and pointing things out to me. Heh.
Couldn't even leave your addy for me? Here: grade_giver@excite.com
Are you local? Let's meet up for coffee soon. Figures you'd take philosophy first sem…
Mail me, Dude.
I sent you an internet mail at least a week and a half ago, and i have no idea if you received it or not. Check your spam or junk boxes. And if you didn't get it at all, email me at kornaddict89@yahoo.com.
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