💾 Archived View for welovedyou.xyz › janwen › misc › sep122023.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:50:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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It's been stressful.
A couple incidents of note:
1. A student complained in writing that my trans flag was bigger than the american flag in the room (lol)
2. A student came to class straight up wearing a hoodie that said "I AM HOMOPHOBIC" on it. I just ignored it and called the principal and he got got. I would have handled it myself but I was all but certain he was hoping I would cause a scene and he'd earn Triggered Tranny Points (tm).
3. A number of trans students who I don't even have in my classes have been showing up in the mornings and at lunch just to talk about video games. They really did just see the flag and walk straight in. One of them sent me an encouraging email after hearing I had a hard day. These kids can be so sweet.
I'm literally planning each day's class the night before (if that). I feel like I'm in survival mode and i'm such a long way from implimenting all the cool best practices I learned in school because right now I'm just struggling to fill time. I think I can see a world where I have my shit more together. It's much simpler to imagine my shit coming together once I let myself imagine class sizes under 27, but yeah. My biggest problem right now is honestly probably confidence, because I am in fact surviving, it just feels like I'm doing it in a loserly fashion somehow. I'm trying to hold on to the moments where I felt like I absolutely killed it. I'm good at this though. I know that from experience. Not that "this" as a job constructed by a broken education system is something humans are meant to be good at.
I've taken two days off since school started, so I haven't actually worked a full week yet. The first time I was just so stressed out my body shut down. This time I had a big existential crisis about the meaning of what I was doing and whether it was worth the trouble. I called in last night and lied that my mom was sick. (Tangent: my colleague told me that he didn't get "family sickness leave" approved because he wasn't married to his partner, and apparently the HR guy straight up told him "you should have lied and said it was your mom." so I'm learning from that.)
Some time this morning I felt like I'd at least sort of resolved it. It's a tough pill to swallow but there really is no such thing as being an effective mentor for youth with zero amounts of coercion. If a toddler's going ot stab a power outlet, you gotta yank em away. But how many situations are truly analogous to that, etc, etc. I'll go into more depth on this sometime here maybe, I just wanted to get a quick update out.
Teaching is good and school is bad