Remember spitballs and rubberbands?

Not sure why I keep trying to be a teacher. I think it's something to do with the facts that (a) I like people, including young people, and (b) I like teaching, in the sense that I like helping someone learn something new, or see a new perspective, or experience something new. I'm interested in the processes of people's minds, so I don't get impatient when a person is struggling to learn something; I find it interesting to figure out how to explain or teach something.

However, I really don't like dragging anyone anywhere (obviously I'm speaking figuratively here, though I wouldn't enjoy literally dragging anyone, either). I don't like feeling invisible, and I really don't like feeling like an impediment to other people's fun. In other words, I hate classroom management. I also hate chaotic classrooms. Preventing chaos and entropy and wholesale abandonment of any educational objectives is extremely exhausting, at least with my current group of 14 and 15 year old.

I was going to say that it's just the age of the students, but then I remember my classes in the Solomon Islands, where I don't remember having any classroom management issues.

I feel pissed off at society for creating an anti-educational atmosphere among the poor and working classes. I feel pissed off at the parents for not raising their children to have the manners I expect. I feel pissed off at the dads who haven't been there to raise their sons. I feel pissed off at the moms whose ideas of strict parenting involves physical and verbal abuse. I feel pissed off at all the elementary teachers who didn't quash students' inappropriate classroom behavior. I'm horrified at myself for using the word 'quash' about what is really liveliness and spirit. I'm pissed off at myself for letting myself get into the situation I'm in. I'm also pissed off at myself for not having more fortitude and more persistence (I am already fantasizing about how I could honorably escape from my job). However, I do know (or think I know) that it'll get better and that I'll be sad at the end of the year to leave my students for the summer. If I think about them individually, I love them and even understand and can sympathize with what they do. Still, I cry.

I'd like to teach. I'd like to feel like I was offering them something besides an obstacle to get around, an object to laugh at, an authority to rebel against.

Not today, apparently. Maybe tomorrow.