"a very great and pretty person"

I can't decide yet whether I feel like an adult. My world right now is split between two realms. There is the "real world" realm--job, car, bills, meetings, rent, taxes--where I am expected to function as an independent person but have no clue what I'm doing and thus feel very young. And then there is the teacher realm, where I am not just an adult, but a "super adult"; I spend all day being the authority in 49 people's lives, and all the kids think I'm 50.

Sometimes my mind is stuck in one of these worlds and I have a hard time transitioning to the other. I am tempted occasionally to "pull a teacher" on other adults (I almost assigned my neighbors a demerit awhile ago, but that's another story). But most of the time, I feel like I have the reverse problem -- I feel so very young and inexperienced that I forget I am this "super adult" to the people I spend -- let's face it -- most of my waking hours with.

So I forget things like the fact that anything I say can suddenly carry the weight of "wisdom," whether I intend it to or not. A student in our grade recently gave a speech to the rest of her classmates about what motivated her during an assembly; she started by saying, "As Ms. Stuntz taught us, 'Every cloud has a silver lining.'" I had made them figure out this expression a few days before when I was feeling grumpy about a project we were doing and needed to adjust my attitude (once again, not really an adult...) but it was a 5 minute tangent and I never expected it to stick. I thought, "Oh no! Such a cliche!" but there it was, and all the children were smiling and nodding at me and I had to nod back with a big, "I'm proud of you" smile. The principal hasn't yet mentioned that on my evaluation. Here's hoping it's not the first thing that comes to mind when she's analyzing the "rigor" of my curriculum.

I also forget that I am someone to impress. My students are, hands down, cooler than me. This is not just because I'm an adult and they're teenagers. If I were in middle school with them, I can guarantee that they would not have hung out with me. Thankfully, I am not in middle school, and my job is to be the crazy cheesy lady in the front of the room who they scowl at, so most of the time our coolness discrepancy is more amusing than bothersome. Then, though, there are the delightful days when they swallow their pride and decide they need, usually for some desperate reason, to win me over. These days are few and far between (remember, I am still very, very uncool) but I've had three in the past week that were funny and I thought I'd share.

1) I am in the midst of writing my students high school recommendations. They are supposed to attach a letter to me "formally" requesting this recommendation. One student started hers, "Dear Ms. Stuntz, Let me first say thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to have you as a teacher." Apparently, I deigned to allow this very grateful student to sit in my class and pout when I assign homework, although I don't even remember that interaction. Who knew I had such a magnanimous nature?

2) The other afternoon, a group of students asked me, "Ms. Stuntz, what do you do when you're not teaching us?" (This was shortly after they had seen me walk in with a Dunkin Donuts cup, so I knew that this question was not innocent curiosity.) I said, "Well, normally, I grade papers or plan lessons." One student responded, "Hmm. You know, come to think of it, my teachers really do work harder than me." Thanks, Kevin, for the affirmation. I wasn't sure about that one.

3) Since my students are hormonal, they all go through a wide range of emotions regarding their teachers, often on a minute-by-minute basis. The one student who I am absolutely convinced does not like me a majority of the time recently got suspended. He came back to class today clearly knowing that he needed to get back in everyone's good graces. I had a teacher "surprise" us in class by carrying in a cake; I then asked the students to write down why they thought the other teacher had brought me a cake (as part of our discussion on how to make reasonable inferences). This student wrote, "because it's good and you are a very great and pretty person." No more needs be said about that one.