Being a teacher

So I'm in the process of applying for teacher training programs. No big deal. The nice thing about my university though is that many professors force students to teach class once per quarter, so I'm at least sort of prepared. Until today I'd only done this for French classes, and I gotta say that I don't remember too well how they went. In French you're too busy trying to remember which word you need and in which tense/mood/person or whatever, and trying desperately not to accidentally say something inappropriate,* so you don't have a lot of energy left to pay attention to the daydreaming, doodling, and facebooking sitting before you.

*Example of something inappropriate: Today in Hebrew class a girl said "to fuck" instead of "to identify with." Apparently I was the only kid in class who knew how to say "to fuck" because I was the only person who laughed.

Anyway, all of this changed today when I had to be the teacher for the Religion Seminar. It actually wasn't too much work. Basically I just had to come up with a couple of questions, ask the class, and then WHOA off they go, debating with each other. For the most part I hate that class because many members of the class seem to think that even choirs of angels in heaven could not compare to the beauty that is their voice. There's one student in particular who's just so arrogant, pretentious and greedy with class time that I sometimes wonder whether or not his presence in my life is the karmic result of a murder-rape I committed in a previous life. The worst part of having people like this is that you assume that the teacher probably likes them, that they must get great grades. But that was until today, when I faced the class....and realized that this guy somehow manages to be even more grating when viewed from the teacher's perspective.

Someone asked a pretty inoffensive question about Emil Durkheim's definition of religion to hear the class's thoughts. You know, it's the sort of thing where you can passionately be like, "Oh, I disagree with Durkheim's interpretation and here's why," but it's hardly the Holocaust. But this boy, draped in a large shawl with swirly patterns with the same feminine drama of a 60's film star, this asshole rolls his eyes with such overwhelming surliness and disgust that I could have sworn he was having some kind of epileptic fit.

"Call an ambulance," I wanted to cry out, "Axe-Chin is having a stroke!" (I call him Axe-Chin because he has such a strong cleft in his chin that it looks like someone took an axe to his face...which is actually what I sometimes imagine doing after two and a half hours of class in which he can't figure out how to shut the fuck up.)

Anyway....it was an interesting experience. Apart from trying to politely beat Axe-Chin into submission so that shier members of class could share their thoughts, I didn't really do much besides watch people as they either paid attention, or daydreamed (and I sort of daydreamed about what they were daydreaming about), or doodled. It was kind of surreal, thinking that hopefully I'll be doing something like this a lot more in the future. Except unlike my profs here, I hope that I'll have the balls to say, "Shut the fuck up so that someone else can share what they think, you greedy bastard." How more professors don't throttle their students is just beyond me...