Teacher’s Pet

When you’re young you like to think that teachers like all the students equally.  There may always be a “teacher’s pet”, but deep down you liked to believe that they liked you all the same – even those who were always stuck banging erasers after class.  This fondness all those beyond the age threshold of adulthood foster for the younger of their species.  Like how your parents love you, and all your friends’ parents love you, regardless of past misbehavior.

Well, today I would like to officially squash that naïve, possibly once self-protecting little theory of mine once and for all.  The teachers do NOT like all the kids equally, and there is said “teacher’s pet” for a reason.  And no matter how much you didn’t want to believe it back then: the teachers really DO talk about the kids in the teacher’s room!  An age-old practice that may be the cornerstone of suicide prevention in many cases.

I don’t care if you’re 5 or 65 – as far as age is concerned, not much changes through time by way of one’s partiality or detest for specific human beings.  The difference is the necessity and heightened (hopefully) ability to control how you really feel.  Through years of socialization, humans become masters of disguise.  We glide through this life leaving civility intact by wearing masks specifically designed for different people in different situations.

Though it turns out, partiality and detest can switch on and off more quickly than I could have ever anticipated.  Many students whom the others may have called “pet” in the beginning of my time here have turned out to be some I must force a smile with, and those who’ve made my life hell have become the most fun and rewarding.  First impressions are deceiving, especially when you are digging under language, cultural, and age barriers.  Also, kids are simply moody as all hell, and the angle the sunrise hits the foot of their bed in the morning can trigger either a great class or the onset of a migraine for me.

This enlightenment of my prior naïvety has caused me to wonder, then, if it is too a fallacy that all parents love their children “unconditionally” and equally, as they all claim (again, hopefully) that they do.  I am not a parent, so can’t obviously know firsthand, but I do know that parenting a child 24 hours a day for 18 years must be much more trying on affection than 50 minutes twice a week.  Especially if the kid is a bonafide brat, which I now believe is legitimate.  I know there is certainly a degree of “love” there, since the small human is a product of your own body and there is an innate drive to take care of it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to actually like it.  I know I didn’t always make life easy for my parents, and I have to say even I was better than many people I know.

All I know is, something must be working on some ulterior level because we keep producing the unpredictable little things and allowing them to grow one year older.