Hate Everything About Me

I’m messy. I’m lazy. I’m unmotivated. Sometimes, I have trouble just getting up in the mornings.

I’m painfully shy; in fact, I’m a misanthrope. I hate people. And the worst thing is, I actually feel hurt when they hate me back.

I’m shallow and a complete looks snob. I would never get between the sheets with an ugly bloke…and yet I expect the Brad Pitts of the world to throw this ugly dog a boner.

I’m self-conscious and a nail-biter. My hands and voice tremble when I’m nervous. People think I’m cold or stupid or just plain crazy. All of those things are probably true, but mostly, I’m just scared of them.

When I’m pissed off, I have the kind of vocabulary that would make Gordon Ramsey and the writers of Underbelly blush. There is no middle ground with me—when I’m not numbed by apathy, I either build all the way up to heaven or destroy all the way down to hell. Usually the latter. I look (and feel) completely insane when the rage takes over, and have been known to hurl objects, furniture and small children. Alternatively? I just repress it all and let the anger build up until I end up cutting myself.

I’m an egotistical bitch. I exaggerate my abilities, my intellect, my achievements. I’m the Ernest Hemingway of bullshit, and frequently buy my own manure (sadly, I even thought that was a good metaphor.)

I’m depressed CONSTANTLY. I have no energy for anything more strenuous than lifting the remote, or the Playstation joystick, or possibly the phone to dial in for a pizza (I’m a lousy cook) or some gay phone sex hotline (because all the phone sex hotlines available cater only to straight MEN, and I can’t segregate myself from everything male and sexual for too long in case the old axe wound heals over, but it gets a bit difficult to fantasize about straight sex when you’ve got Papa Bear on the other line telling you he wants to use your arse as a pussy-proxy).

I’m also ugly. I know I’ve said that already, but it bears repeating because today one of my Year Nine boys spied my skinnier, perkier, blonder colleague giving her class a lecture in the room next door, and complained, ‘Aw, no fair! How come we don’t get the HOT teacher!?’ Compared to some of my colleagues, I’m a feral bush pig. My acceptance of this fact doesn’t make it hurt any less.

There are many many many more things I could list, but I’m too tired and you’re too coupled and happy. So I’ll leave you to the loving arms of your sex poodle and retire to my cold solitary single bed alone, and fiddle myself into a (hopefully) dreamless sleep.

Buon a notte,
Me.

Knobs

I’m taking the day off today because my all-boy class has been driving me fucking mental. They’re such knob-heads sometimes. I think that if I don’t get time away from them, I just may cause one of them grievous bodily harm. They’ve been asking questions about my sex life recently and making wildly inappropriate remarks, and I’ve had it. So I planned some relief lessons and phoned in sick. Yeah, call me slack, but sick days are a sanity preserver at this school.

The parents always complain that they have too many relief teachers, but what do they expect when their sprogs treat the staff like the irritating white noise that gets in the way of their oh-so-important pronouncements about so-and-so’s consummate skankiness? The next person who tells me teachers have it good because we ‘only’ work 9 to 3 and get the school holidays off can go piss up a rope.

Female Snobs, Male Slobs

I would love to play the slob in a comedy like Knocked Up. Hollywood needs a female Seth Rogen. It’s just not fair that men always get to be the crude, dirty-joke-telling slackers, while the female characters are the uptight prudes who always spoil the boys’ fun. It’s such a dumb, sexist portrayal. Ok, so it probably reflects real-life dynamics to some extent, but in real-life women aren’t always the fastidious, humourless, responsible ones. And surprise surprise, I’ve even met a few blokes whom one could describe as easily offended, even (gasp!) humourless. And isn’t the goal of cinema to represent as many realities as possible, no matter how anomalous? (I’m not even sure the female slob/male germphobe is that much of an aberration, at least not these days when some male Gen Yers may’ve attended feminist boot camp and their female counterparts are equally as likely to be so indulged by doting parents they’ve never had to lift a finger around the house, but that’s a rant for another time).

I’ve wanted to play the slacker in a screwball comedy since age twelve. I’ve always identified with the Playstation-addicted, unemployed couch potato who got kicked out of his girlfriend's apartment at the beginning of the movie, gazing morosely at the suitcase she’d chucked in his face before gathering up his stuff and leaving to go on a crazy adventure without the bitch. And we know she’ll get her comeuppance: As the credits roll, he’ll be cavorting around with a bevy of titular babes, and she’ll be the humourless sow who has to spend the rest of her life alone because she didn’t love him for who he was. I loved those movies as a kid. It never occurred to me to wonder at their somewhat dodgy gender politics. It was only in my late teen years that I started thinking, ‘Ok, where are all the women in the funny roles? Why do they just stand there looking pretty/offended/pretty offended, while the boys tell all the dirty jokes? Well, that fucking sucks.’

Cameron Diaz was never going to cut it for me. Yeah, she was bubbly and fun-loving, and she did win a burping contest at the Nickelodean Kids’ Choice Awards, but, the odd smutty double entendre in There’s Something About Mary and Charlie’s Angels aside, Diaz’s role in virtually every comedy she stars in, romantic or otherwise, is clear: she is The Pretty Chick. In your standard Hollywood comedy, The Pretty Chick is the girl the slacker lusts after and either obtains through trial and error, or willingly relinquishes for a generic blonde non-bitch who understands him and loves him warts and all. Oh, she may get the odd rude line here and there (never as rude as the guy), but mostly, she’s strictly for decorative purposes.

I want to know why so few screwball comedies grant their female characters full human status. I want to know why male comedy writers seriously expect female audience members will identify more with the Katherine Heigels and Jessica Albas and Michelle Monoghans than with the Steve Carrells and Will Ferrells and Jonah Hills and Jim Carreys and (yes) Jason Mewses. And if anybody seriously believes that these Pretty Chick pieces of eye candy are perfectly acceptable substitutes for fully-realised female characters, please give me her number so I can get her over to my place stat and commence the corruption process. Cheers.

Thoughts On Emo Kids and Matrimony

Just wanted to share something I wrote in my (brand spanking new!) journal the other night.

Hey New Journal,

According to Buddhism inanimate objects have souls, so communicating with you does not make me insane (let’s just keep the tapping, the superstitions, the obsessive rituals and the little voices a secret, okay?)

It’s back to school on Monday and, oddly, I’m way less terrified than I thought I’d be. This is in spite of the fact that I have an additional Year Nine class and have been bumped up a work faction (0.8. Whee.) Said class is an interesting bunch too, full of freaky-looking Emo kids with these wild outfits and piercings. And make-up: One girl has this full-on, Amy Winehouse-inspired bat-wing eyeshadow—the left eyelid is fluoro pink and the right one fluoro green. Another is like a living breathing Emily The Strange doll. I know some of their names already: the Emily Strange one is called April, and there’s another one called Jasper. The one with the lip-piercing is Hayley. I taught them once when I was asked to do an internal relief—walking into that classroom was like wandering onto the set of Children Of The Corn. I’ve christened them The Future Undertakers Of Australia. Their other teacher is going on a one-term hiatus to Spain, so they’ll be all mine. Based on what I’ve seen of them so far, they’re way less gormless than their dark creepy subcultural attire suggests. They’re actually surprisingly warm and humorous. Well, the girls are anyway. The boys are just your typical dunny-brush-haired surfer types, only quieter. They’re far less interesting, sartorially speaking.

Hmm, what else? Oh, an old friend of mine recently got hitched. Shawna Kane is now Shawna Rosetti. She’s married ‘a nice Italian boy.’ I don’t envy her—I know that Italian boys can be nice—nicely wedded to Mum’s apron strings. The whiny, nasal, weaselly little demands of Ray Romano that his wife cook, clean and screw according to his whims is basically what you get in a ‘relationship’ with a Man-Child Spaghetti-Muncher. But enough with the stereotypes; you can probably guess from my tone I’ve been thoroughly soured on the whole institution of marriage. I just don’t like how it squashes perfectly good friendships into two ticky tacky little boxes, one marked ‘m’ and the other marked ‘f’, and the one marked ‘m’ involves the fun stuff like having a sense of humour and rough-housing with the kids, and the one marked ‘f’ involves boring stuff like breastfeeding and nappy-changing and nurturing, and the one marked ‘m’ is the eternal kid who the other kids love and the one marked ‘f’ is the humourless disciplinarian who they all hate even though she does everything for them...yawn. I’ve seen this dynamic happen with even the most liberal-minded, well-intentioned of couples. Once they walk down that aisle, they enter an institution that has been remarkably resistant to over three decades of feminism, and any valiant attempts to break with tradition are usually strangled by the brass ring noose.

Cynical bitch, aren’t I?

But still, I congratulated my friend on her nuptials , and meant it. Hey, it’s not for me, but she’s happy with it so live and let live, right? (and she did look fucking amazing in that white dress.)

What bothers me about the whole marriage thing is not my friends’ willingness to rush into it (though most of the gang seem to be hurtling toward the alter with all the foresight of a pack of lemmings), nor their unquestioning acceptance of a frankly fossilised institution (though it occasionally pisses me off), but simply the fact that the way I live is viewed as being infinitely inferior by those soon-to-be slotted neatly away in the nuclear family filing cabinet.

When I wrote to Shawna about her wedding, she responded with: ‘Yeah, I’m married! FINALLY.’ (Finally? Finally!? Hon, you’re twenty-three. For heaven’s sakes: Is screwing around not a priority for today’s youth? Lord oh Lord, where did it all go wrong?) I must admit, sometimes us single chicks perpetuate desperate Brigid Jones stereotypes as well: another friend of mine, Kelly, when she heard about Shawna’s wedding, responded with: ‘Oh, you’re so lucky to be married! I’m not doing much of anything—just mid-way through an International Politics & Justice degree at uni. And you’re married, living the real life.’ (What is the world coming to when a twenty-first-century gal dismisses her personal ambitions and supremely intellectually-stimulating politics & justice degree as ‘not much of anything’? And what’s with this ‘real life’ shit? Someone pinch me quick, for I am a single woman and hence unsure of the reality of my existence).

Wake up, girls! It’s 2008! Drop the 1950’s bullshit already. It’s an ideology that sucks now, sucked then, and seriously makes your arse look fat.

Well, that’s enough for now. More fascinatingly tedious life-chronicling to come!

The Comeback Bitch

“Miss, you got a boyfriend?”

“Nope. Do you?”

An exchange between myself and one of my Year Ten boys. I know I’m supposed to rise above it in detachment, or play The Offended Woman and sermonise about appropriate student-teacher relations, or whatever, but sometimes it’s just easier to reply with a snappy retort and then get on with it. And if you can make their friends laugh at them, so much the better.

(I do feel bad that the remark probably unintentionally reinforced homophobia though. But I figure my regular lectures on the importance of tolerance makes up for it).

Smile Like You Don’t Mean It

“Do you always look this serious, Katrina?”

Only when I’m breathing.

If I had a dollar for every time a man said some variation of “smile, pretty!” to me, I could quit teaching right now, retire and build a mansion in Toorak.

And it is men who say this. My uncles say it to me all the time at family get-togethers. They compliment me on what a beautiful smile I have, but you’d better believe they’re quick to comment on its absence. Remarks like, “Hey, what’s the matter, sweetie?”; “Cheer up—it can’t be that bad!”, and “Oi, what’s a girl your age got to frown about?” can all be expected if I fail to exhibit anything less than the standard Sugar-And-Spice feminine friendliness.

Male strangers say it too. During the summer holidays when I was at the Hillarys boat harbour, a drunk guy approached me. He came up close to me and said aggressively, “Do you know what your problem is? You’re not smiling! A young chick like you wouldn’t be here alone if you smiled! You’d look more approachable.” He said it less coherently than that, being drunk, but the sentiment expressed was no different than if he’d been stone-cold sober. And it didn’t make me want to tell him to take his unsolicited opinion, wrap it in barbed wire, and shove it up his rectum any less.

A hippie dude I knew through a friend when we lived in Dunsborough used to frequently stop and chat with me whenever we bumped into each other in town (since this “town” was the two-horse variety, and we were both bicycle-dependent, this happened often). He was a pretty nice guy though, and I felt less anxious around him than I did around many other people. But I’ll never forget one particular conversation we had. I won’t go into it here, as its content was less important than how it made me feel afterwards; which, initially, was pretty elated. It seemed (to my teenage self) that I had so few people who really gave a crap about the minutiae of my school life, that it was a rarity to find someone who actually cared enough to listen to what I was saying. But just as I’d thanked this dude for being so understanding and was bidding him goodbye, he turned around and said: “Hey, no worries...but Katrina? I’ve been meaning to ask you—why do you frown so much? Someone do something to you or what?”

He hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

The most recent one happened yesterday. I was at a Professional Development seminar for graduate teachers, and a guy at my table—a maths teacher in his 30’s—decided to play armchair psych. Apparently I wasn’t participating as enthusiastically and energetically in the conversation as he’d have liked, because when it came to a lull, he chose that moment to loudly ask, “Do you always look this serious, Katrina?” The whole table turned to stare at me. I was slightly mortified; I’d had this daydream-omelette frying in my brain, part song chorus playing in a continuous loop, part sexual fantasy, part monkey scratching its head. I had no idea what they’d been talking about. And now, all eyes were on me. I think I said, “Huh?”

The maths teacher guy repeated the question, and added, “You seem sort of sad.” (Great—I’ve been downgraded from “angry” to the more acceptably feminine “sad.”) I protested, “I’m not sad—I was just thinking.” Instead of asking what I’d been thinking about, the genius persisted: “Sure you’re ok? There’s nothing you want to say...about your school or anything?” (Fair call—I do work at Clarkson). “No, I’m fine. It’s cool—really! I was just daydreaming.” “Oh. I just thought you looked a bit unhappy.” “I’m not. This is how my face looks when I’m thinking.” “Hey, don’t get defensive. I was just asking.” “And I was just telling. I don’t tend to be all smiles when I’m deeply engaged in thought. Thankyou.” Uneasy silence around the table. Luckily, a female teacher intervened: “Oh, leave the poor girl alone, Russ! Can’t you see you’ve embarrassed her?” “Sorry, love,” Russ apologised, grinning. “That’s ok,” I said. But it really wasn’t.

I’m really sick of people inferring from my poker-face that I must be either pissed off or miserable or both. In most of the examples I’ve given and many, many other times, I was neither. When people, typically men, ask me if I’m angry, their tone has an almost accusatory ring to it—how dare I be angry! Don’t I know that violent feelings are for males only? Don’t I know that swearing and talking about how I’d like to punch someone’s face in isn’t cute and little-ladylike? Haven’t I heard that aggression in females is reserved exclusively for “that time of the month?” When they ask me if I’m sad, the tone is a paternal one of faux-concern: “Are you alright, sweetie? You can cry—tears are feminine, after all! Just don’t cry so much that you look like a crazy wailing banshee or Morticia Addams put through the rinse cycle—you have an image to uphold, you know!”

And this is the crux of the matter: whether the “smile, pretty!” remark is made in an aggressive tone or a gentle one, its function is always the same: To keep you in your role. In this case, it’s the role of the always-smiling, always-accommodating, pliant fembot who never develops any frown lines on her pretty little forehead and never expresses any aggressive, anti-social or otherwise less-than-saintly thoughts or feelings—ever. No matter how many roles you play, comments like this are designed to make sure you don’t deviate too much from the script. And men are absolutely afforded wider latitude than women with regard to their roles. My dad constantly voices his dissatisfaction over having a daughter who swears often, shaves seldom, likes really gory horror movies and medical shows and reads mens’ mags. I don’t fit the “ideal daughter” stereotype according to his criteria, and am reminded daily of it. I have a friend, my age and also female, who is offended by coarse language, likes chick flicks, and listens to her boyfriend talk about football and cricket. She wants to start a family with him one day. My dad sometimes compares me to her, and bemoans my inability to play the role of the uncomplicated Aussie chick as well as she does. My brother, on the other hand, may swear, fart and play Grand Theft Auto with impunity.

Likewise, a man can be a husband and a father and still be able to laugh at a raunchy ad on the telly. No-one will batt an eye. But if a woman who’s a mother laughs at the ad—that’s heresy. Mothers aren’t supposed to do that! Hasn’t she heard that mums are supposed to be prudish and uptight? It’s always, “Don’t let your MOTHER catch you using bad language/competitive farting/watching porn.” Fathers aren’t mentioned—presumably because they like all of those things. But what if you’re a dad who’s offended by them? Or a mum who really digs them? Of course that’s perfectly normal. But whole television series depend on these stereotypes for their humour (The Simpsons, Family Guy, Everybody Loves Raymond), and a pierced-and-tattooed Mum who fingers herself to images of two men kissing could certainly be excused for feeling like an anomalous freak.

Please understand—I have no problem with roles. At all. I recognise that as people, we need to maintain a sense of separateness from our primordial muck if society is to function at all, and our roles may help us do that. I like that my students know I’m still human, but I don’t like it so much if they see me paying a visit to the liquor store. To buy vodka. On a Tuesday night (I kid! I at least wait ‘til Friday). And roles are certainly useful for providing us with a sense of security and identity. Roles help create boundaries; they define what we do, who we are, our purpose in life. That’s all fine. What I don’t like is when people attempt to strait-jacket me in the feminine role of sweetness and false happiness so tightly that there’s no breathing room for authentic human response.

And that brings me back to the smile remark. It’s stupid and sexist. Women don’t tell a scowling man to smile, and men sure as hell don’t tell other men to smile. But both sexes are all over a frowning woman like flies on shit, trying to gauge her mood and pontificating at length on her psychological state if her Virgin Mary Inner Goodness fails to radiate through her face. This is neither realistic nor particularly kind. Essentially, by telling someone that all they need to do is smile, you are in effect saying you care more about a person’s ability to play a role and live up to a superficial image than you do about the person—their thoughts, their feelings, their life circumstances and wellbeing—behind the facade. Not very humanising, huh?

To be fair, my face is typically expressionless. It’s one of those inscrutable types that never reveals what I’m thinking or feeling. In terms of readability, it’s the epidermal equivalent of Morse Code. There could be a storm of emotions and passions raging inside me, but you won’t see any of it. What you might see, however, is one angry-looking vertical frown line that runs between my eyebrows like an exclamation mark—even when my facial features are relaxed. In this exclamation mark are the infinite stresses accumulated through five years of high school and four years of uni, and it’s here to stay. In fact, it’s present even when I am smiling! So I guess I can forgive some people for thinking I’m always angry, sad or stressed.

What I will not forgive are the people who for some reason see fit to voice these thoughts to my face—then have the arrogance to insist they know what I’m feeling better than I know myself. It’s like when my brother, who’s built like a small tank, steps on my foot and insists that it doesn’t hurt: “You’ve stepped on my toe before, and it didn’t hurt me,” he claimed. “Dumbass,” I’d said, “You’re bigger than me! But more importantly—it’s my toe! I’m the authority. I’ll say whether it hurts or not. How I feel is not for you to decide.” And that’s exactly how it ought to be for me and the guys who tell me to smile: If the reason I’m not smiling is because I’m upset about something, don’t try to minimise the pain you think “isn’t all that bad!”—when it’s yours, you may judge. Likewise, if I’m not smiling but am secretly overjoyed inside, don’t insist otherwise when I correct you and say that I truly am really, really happy. ‘Kay?

To any guys who may be reading this, a handy hint: If you wouldn’t say it to another man, please don’t say it to me.

The maths teacher I met at the P.D. said something stupid later on that revealed his true colours. When one of the female teachers at our table started to clear our plates away for us after we’d had lunch, he jokingly remarked, “See? This is why it’s so great to be at a table full of women. They all immediately start to do what comes naturally!” He’d commented earlier in the session on the alleged nastiness of bullying and bitchiness among girls compared with the “more benign” fist-fighting of boys. When a female teacher countered with a situation in which a boy had bullied a girl in a way that was quite elaborate and under-handed, he replied, “Well, that settles it: Boys are smarter!” Wanker. Why do women sleep with men like this? The next time I meet a guy I’d like to get horizontal with, I’ll be sure to ask him three equality-centred questions first. That way, if he gets the questions right, I won’t have to worry about contributing to the dumbing-down of the human race if the condom breaks. Gets them wrong? I forget about him and spend the night with my trusty detachable shower nozzle.

It’s sad that people—men and women—feel so shackled by their roles that they often don’t feel free to be themselves. Or worse, that they force others to play by their repressive rules. People like my dad and that maths teacher are so enamoured of the idea of 50’s wives and docile daughters that when they encounter real females whose behaviours and attitudes and appearances run counter to those images, they try to force them into those roles anyway—and the result is either unhappy submission or a furious two fingers up, because the woman’s individuality is being denied.

That’s why it was so gratifying to me when another teacher revealed how she honestly felt about some of her students. When I first started working at Clarkson, another female teacher came in and sat in the desk opposite me. She looked lovely—nice make-up, immaculate hair, manicured fingernails—both professional and attractive. I noticed she’d placed a pile of folders on her desk—she’d obviously just had a class. Sympathetically, I asked: “So—how were they?” “Right shitbags,”she replied.

She smiled broadly when she said it.

“Look, Miss! No Brain!”

Like, WHOA.

Ok. So. Here's what's happening in my life so far:

• I teach high school students.
• I'm teaching lower-school English.
• One of my classes consists entirely of psychos, sociopaths and slow-learners.
  AND
• Every day thus far has been VERY entertaining.
  

Take Thursday. I have an all-boy class of Year 10s, about twenty of them (though generally no more than fourteen actually make an appearance; out tending to their crops I’d imagine). Said class has been quarantined from the rest of the herd to prevent behaviour contamination (Apparently, furniture destruction and Superbad-style penis graffiti are highly contagious). These are the type of kids that we address very slowly and very politely (“So, have you ever considered, you know, leaving school early and going into paid employment? It would really suit you!”) They aren’t academic, don’t see the point of school, and use each lesson as an excuse to piss around. Basically, I’m tasked with keeping them amused for an hour so they don’t run riot.

Lucky me, right?

Anyway, on Thursday, there was chaos as usual: Lots of calling each other “poofter” and “pussy”, and no work being done. Which was fine by me (I kept myself amused by wondering if their sexism and homophobia were the result of a latent same-sex attraction, or maybe a secret desire to cross-dress. Not that I’d ever say that to them; I don’t believe in using prejudice to get kids to behave. Plus, they’re toolheads and would respond as such.) So anyway, there I was trying to get them to behave like human beings, as opposed to, you know, crazed apes on crack, when a water bottle comes flying across the room and hits James*, this fight-prone British kid, square in the face. The owner of the water bottle was B.J.*, a cheeky little Indigenous kid with ADD (who’s perfectly sweet on the days he remembers to take his meds. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of them).

“B.J.!” I yelled. “Outside! NOW!”

He gave me a mildly contrite look. “Aw, geeze Miss. That boy knows I’m only stuffing around. He can handle it—he’s used to it. See?”

Then he walked over and emptied the entire bottle over James’s head.

“That does it! B.J., APOLOGISE NOW. How would you feel if someone tipped a water bottle over your head?”

“I’d like it, Miss! This weather’s too bloody hot anyway.” (I really should’ve seen that one coming).

“OUTSIDE. NOW.”

He kicked a few desks and swore under his breath as he walked out, but I didn’t care—hey, he complied, right?

When I went outside to sort B.J. out (making sure I took my keys with me, so the little bastards wouldn’t lock me out), I heard James yell: “You f*#king c*#t! Come here and say that! I’ll F*#KING KILL YOU!” I raced back in. James had Ray, Shit-Stirrer Extraordinaire, by the collar and was slamming him up against the wall. “GET BACK IN YOUR SEATS RIGHT NOW!” I yelled. Of course, the other idiots were egging them on. Luckily, Ray was able to break loose from James and ran off to the other side of the room, which meant I was able to get between them. I’m not allowed to touch students (no teacher is), but I thought that at least positioning myself between them might break up the fight. It did. Initially.

So once I’d screamed them back into their seats (at opposite ends of the room), I tried to explain to everyone why these fights weren’t acceptable and how they’d be sent to the deputy if they tried to pull this shit in class again and so forth (all the while having to contend with Ray calling James “douchebag”, “fudgepacker”, etc.), and meanwhile, I could see that James had this brooding, intense look on his face. He looked about ready to burst a blood vessel. I wondered what it would take to tip this kid over the edge. So, to prevent another Who’s Got The Most Testosterone Competition, I sent Ray outside. As Ray was leaving the room, he turned to James. I heard the words, “Your mother”, and “c*#t.”

That did it.

“I’LL F*#KING KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD!”

James punched Ray fair in this face. Ray went down, and then James sat on top of him and grabbed at his throat.

Meanwhile, B.J., who had come back inside to see the first fight, was now outside again, running down the hall and banging on all the other class windows: “OI! EVERYONE! THERE’S A FIGHT GOING ON INSIDE MISS P’S CLASS! QUICK--COME SEE!”

And so, during the fight I had two-and-a-half other classes spectating from outside. Three teachers, one deputy and one security guard later, the fight ceased. The kids were a mess, the classroom looked like ground zero and I was in tears.

So, my dear private school teacher-friends: NEVER tell me how bad your class was because they talk too much, or because you caught a kid chewing gum, or because you had ONE rude tosspot who answered you back. Because, really:

YOU AIN’T SEEN NUTHIN.'

On the plus side: I think teaching has well and truly cured me of my social phobia. See, for a while there I was mildly terrified of interacting with people. I’m not now; I can communicate normally without wondering how the person I’m speaking to perceives me and freezing up. And that’s really liberating—I can focus on listening to the other person without fretting over how I’m coming across. At high school, and certainly at uni, I never would’ve been able to communicate in front of a class—I was simply too shy. Logically, I knew that the people I spoke to weren’t always scrutinising me or judging me; but emotionally, I still felt as though they were (kinda like how my vegetarianism hasn’t eradicated my desire to savour the taste of meat; it’s reduced it, but it’s still there.) Funny how logic can fail to change your feelings about something one iota. Anyway—I’m less awkward now, so yay.

Ok. Enough emotional exhibitionism. I’ll leave you with the words of a year ten student of one of my colleagues. When she told him that he wouldn’t think jail was so cool once he was getting it up the you-know-where, he replied indignantly:

“Miss, I’ll be the one giving it up the you-know-where!”

God, it’s hard not to laugh sometimes.