Am I petty? Yes. Yes I am.

Me: None of you got capital letters or possessive apostrophes right in your drafts. I'm definitely going to be doing a lesson with you all before the end of the year where I will give you literal worksheets on how to do them correctly.

My students: *laughing thinking that I'm joking*

Me, the lesson after their finals are due: Guess what kids, here's those worksheets I was telling you about.

My students:

My curse is broken! I got renewed at my current school and will be there next year!

I (naively) signed myself up for marking 2nd year undergrad teacher assignments. Let's be honest, the lure of money was the main draw.

To say that it's been a bit of a terrifying experience so far is a bit of an understatement. You kind of forget how clueless some people are to the day-to-day of teaching in a classroom (or understand the first thing about curriculum as a whole).

The head-desking over some of the things that are written in these unit plans/lesson sequences is real, and some of them make you need to walk away for a good hour before coming back to them.

I'm about to start teaching literary commentary to my seniors

I'm updating my PPT to be shinier, as well as more reflective of how petty I'm intending to be in crushing their souls.

Of course we start out with a veto list. I'm using pictures to get around the whole "you're saying mean things to the children" when they inevitably begin crying at me telling them that if they do any of these things that:

Fun side-tangent: upon informing my students on how much of a world of hurt they're going to be in this term to the point where I will literally crush their soul, one of my 10s said that I'd already crushed his soul. I let out a legitimate evil laugh. The kid's face paled when I said "oh buddy, you haven't experienced me crushing your soul yet".

Okay now I'm pissed

The extension year 9 class I inherited by force this term decided on the poor life choice of sending me an email that is effectively telling me that they don't like the way I teach compared to their last teacher (re: I'm not spoon-feeding them information about the novel that they're reading).

Reasons why I dislike extension junior classes: they're lazy and entitled because they think they're naturally good at everything and therefore don't need to do any work to actually be good at something. For some reason they've been allowed to rest on their laurels of self-deluded grandeur.

These kids may be in extension, but let me tell you it's not because of their English skills. They can barely construct a coherent analytical sentence. For crying out loud they couldn't even follow a simple instruction of writing an introduction and body paragraph based on a guiding statement. Either I received one random paragraph that was an amalgamation of an intro and body, no paragraph at all, or a pile of word salad that had no connection to the guiding question.

Did I mention that they said they find the novel they have to study boring and hard to get through? (side note, I GAVE them a choice between TWO novels to study).

I also made it clear from the outset that they should be researching the novel outside of class for background information, as my job as their teacher is to teach them how to fucking write an essay for an exam. I'm not here to give them an extensive history of the Russian Revolution or the theological underpinnings of spirituality and storytelling. To say that I'm pissed about their lack of work ethic and self-motivation in English is a fucking understatement.

I have them first up tomorrow morning seeing as how lockdown's been lifted. They are not prepared by the humble piece of metaphorical two-by-four they're about to get smacked with. The kiddie gloves are coming off and they're staying off. If they want to act like entitled pricks, they're going to get the academic teacher. And I'm very much sure they're not prepared for the academic version of my teaching style. I'm not interested in being liked. I'm interested in them learning that I'm not here to do the work for them and they should not expect that from any teacher.

I'm giving them two lessons before they crack. Am I looking forward to the tears and complaints? Let's just say the schadenfreude will be strong this week.

Online teaching fun times

Positives

- I feel like I actually have time to do my job (the teaching part), without having to sprint from one side of the school to the other for every class.

- behaviour management is not a thing

- I have time to give more real-time and personalised feedback to my students that I wouldn't normally be able to do in the classroom

- I can get through my household chores at a decent hour of the day (seriously, I was so excited to get through multiple loads of laundry in a day - suck it depressive episodes).

- my anxiety levels have decreased somewhat in the past week of teaching from home (not that this is something I want to go on forever - I do actually love teaching in person)

Cons

- The emails

- being distracted easily by TikTok videos and staffroom group chats

- Fighting the urge to simply lounge on the couch and play video games the entire day

- the mild anxiety building from uncertainty that comes with not knowing whether the lockdown will be lifted next week or not until about 16 hours before we're meant to start teaching on Monday