HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Thursday, March 16, 2006Sugar High Noon
This morning, I was sitting in a colleague's classroom right before homeroom, writing up some crap on chart paper so that I could put up some chart-papered crap while I stood before the slobbering hordes today and I made a disturbing discovery.
All right, I shouldn't say that it was a "discovery", because I've heard other teachers talking about this from time to time and I was vaguely aware that this was a problem, but this was the first time it was really driven home to me. I've been dealing with junior high school kids for two years now and I've found a number of things about them to be generally true:
As I sat there, and these kids came in and chatted and put their coats in the closet and went to their seats, I watched almost every single one of them shoveling candy into their mouths. Lots of it. Hershey's Kisses, gummi worms, Sourpatch Kids, Nerds, you name it. All of it washed down by brightly-colored vaguely-fruitish "punch" that you know is 40% water and 60% sugar. This was breakfast. Now look, I'm not expecting that a bunch of 12-year-olds are going to care enough about their health to eat whole-grain oatmeal and a fucking protein shake or anything, but Jesus! Couldn't they at least be given a fucking Pop Tart or something? Something that at least pretends to have some kind of nutritional value? These kids don't eat at home. They swing by the bodega before they get to school and they load up on enough sugar to kill a ward full of diabetics. Then they chug this shit and come to my class wired like Robin Williams circa 1982 and vibrate in their seats instead of paying attention. It's fucking frustrating. This afternoon, I watched a girl who's been Courtney Loving it in my small-group-instruction math class (and I won't even try to explain why it is that a theater teacher is teaching small-group-instruction math) dumping candy into her mouth that was actually just blue sugar. This is why she's been giggling like a fucking hyena at hilarious things like isosceles triangles. At least when we were kids, the Pixie Stix people were honest enough to make the things look like coke straws. And besides, I don't think I ever subsisted on this shit. My school's cafeteria might not have had the greatest food ever plopped down on a plastic tray, but I ate it any goddamn way. I've got a plan, though. I'm going to buy a couple hundred turkeys. I'm going to make soup stock out of them, then really boil it down so it's good and concentrated. I'm going to dump some orange food coloring in there, tell the kids it's orange drink and give them all enough tryptophan to counteract the sugar they've consumed. Then maybe I can teach them all about the joys of Bertolt Brecht.
Comments:
This is the best post I've read in awhile - truly hilarious. I shudder to recall the image I projected to my teachers during my middle school years.
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