As superhuman as I might try to be, I cannot escape the pleasure in being liked. The stony-hearted part of me is fine being cussed out, snarled at, and insulted by students. I take it rather straight-faced and if anything, I become more nonchalant the more the students become agitated. For the most part, the students at my current placement have been rather tame. Moreover, some of my students actually like me here. My chatty students have shared various parts of their lives with me, sharing interests in books, movies, and the like.
One day, my low body temperature was brought up, and I mentioned that one of the other teachers called mea vampire because of it. My students' faces lit up. (I'm trying to avoid finding out whether they're Twilight fans; I'll stick to bonding with them over Harry Potter.) "Miss S, you would make a bad-acid vampire!" The students smiled and glowed at me, nodding their assent. "You have the right hair for it!"
The subject was changed, and zombies were brought up. I turned to one of the students, "I think you would make a bad-acid zombie." The students practically exploded with joy at my use of "bad-acid." I tend to disdain anyone's use of substitutionary cursing (no, "substitutionary" isn't a word); however, in this case, I think this conversation took me miles in building rapport with students, an opinion confirmed by my students' exclamation, "You just became, like, 200 times cooler! I mean . . . you were okay before, but, we didn't really know you and now we know you!"
Perhaps tonight's just a night that I want to think on some of my more amusing teacher-student interactions.
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