Just Tired and Letting it out

Photo not mine.

It’s the end of the day, the end of the week and I am so enervated that I feel I can’t get up from my chair. I am sitting,  feeling my head throbbing from the hours of incessant talking. So, instead of grabbing my motorcycle key and broom-brooming the heck out of the school, I had to sit down and rest for a  few minutes. Resting while typing and talking and inundating all my blah,blah,blah  to this blog while five pupils are cleaning up the room.

Teaching does not tire me; in fact, I enjoy being in front of the class teaching, singing and cracking jokes and laughing with my pupils. What really zaps my energy is the constant struggle to keep my temper at bay.

What pisses me off is the seemingly lack of appreciation from my pupils for the effort I give to be as respectful to them as possible, giving my best to be cool and to level with them so as to lower the tension and lessen the communication barrier during the class, but there are pupils who sometimes misinterpret this as acquiescence and they take advantage. They literally test the limits of my patience. So, I have to continually remind them, sometimes firmly, about the teacher-pupil relationship especially inside the classroom. 

God knows I try my best to hold back. I even go as far as to humor my pupils just to diffuse my anger and make myself laugh at the intolerable rudeness and disrespect of some of my pupils especially those  from among the lower sections, but there are times that these holding back gives in and it's inevitable for emotion to flare up. This is inevitable. But I and all teachers must learn how to control this inevitable eruption especially the tendency and the temptation to physically harm a pupil  i.e. to whack them on the head or throw things at them, or, in my case, the temptation to throw them out of the door.

This happens to the best of us. That’s why whenever there’s news of a teacher physically harming a pupil, I empathize with the teacher. Of course it does not mean that the teacher is justified in hurting his/her pupil/s. I empathize because I know the pressure, and the energy and the effort it take to hold back cumulative stress. These pressure and stress are factors why teachers  lose it and hurt their pupils.  Parents should understand this. I don't believe that teachers are mean, sadistic human beings. Teachers lose composure because of the  work load, the records and the forms, the unscheduled visitations from supervisors and superintendent and other minor department gods, school and inter school activities,  the complaining and the attention seeking-gossip mongering parents, the collections, disrespectful and rude pupils that make the teachers feel  degraded thus losing their sense of self esteem, the negative atmosphere in the work area etc. add these all up and you have dynamites waiting to explode. I am not complaining, but all I am saying is there are factors that affect  teachers behavior, their minds and their effectiveness, and that teachers have different tolerance for stress, humiliation and physical labor.

But hurting pupils is inexcusable. Teachers who lose it and are guilty of physically hurting their pupils should be made accountable and should be meted out the penalty deserving their actions, but these teachers deserve to  be understood too. Teachers who are sex offenders and abusers are exceptions; they should be summarily shot  IN THE GROIN if proven guilty!

Anyway...

Thank God for the weekend. I strongly feel  (most teachers would agree with me) that the weekend should be an inviolable rest day for the teachers because five days of teaching is murder, sucks the life out of us teachers, literally slowly (or if you have heart problem, instantly) killing us, while the two days reprieve give us the opportunity to energize, to build up the reserve power to continue on teaching.

Anyway, I’m just tired and I am not harping on anybody or complaining about anything in general or in particular. I am just tired and I want to rest. I just want to rest.

  

I am thinking of resigning from teaching in the church so that I could enjoy my weekend, but that's another thing..

I just want to rest on the weekend; I believe that's not so difficult to understand :-) Outta here...