An Open Letter to High School Students
I often wonder why I chose to become a teacher. In the beginning, I was a believer out to change the world. Now I settle for summers off. A distasteful change has taken place. I’ve traded outlook for overlook, industry for ire. Is this preordained penance for some karmic-deficit from a previous life or is altruism merely trumping my common sense? I’m writing to you in the hopes that together we might find the answer—an answer that’s been buried under years of callous injury. I’m sorry that you don’t already know what I know but it’s hardly my fault. And it’s no wonder I’ve lost the plot. I spend my day amongst you soul-sipping Versace-clad vampires when I’d rather be shaking my fist from the bell tower.
Is that wrong? Is the sum total of my existence now reduced to stop-gapping your slow-leaking egos with my own self-worth? You demand respect. You offer disdain. You force me to wade through your weapons-grade sense of entitlement but, you can’t get past your own hedonistic notions of individual privilege. You hit the target but miss the point. You convey but don’t convince. Pardon me for recoiling from your specious outrage—it’s not the vacillation I mind; it’s the volume.
I can stomach the incessant cherry-cheeked white noise emanating from your insult-laden insolence, but after I sift through the wafer-thin patina of your blatant prevarications; all that remains is the steady drip, drip, drip of your insipid meanderings—the meaningless import of your profane pronouncements; the random oration in your venomous verdicts. Like some indignant moralizing gossip, you’re always the last to give up the conch. Your myopic world view is reassuringly one dimensional and the joke is at your expense. Why is it that you laugh the loudest? Congratulations. Irony is wasted on the comforted. And I hate myself for being party to your tenuous foot-hold on civility.
I’m aghast at your blissful, boiling-frog indifference—the casual way you steep in your own ignorance. You seek solitude amidst the reflection of a thousand carbon-copies. Yet, you leave traces behind. Emboldened by the sacrosanct certitude of your smug affirmations, you goose-step through your day like downtrodden fascist lemmings coming ever closer to the edge. In your haste to derive benefit, you raise a dust-cloud of resentment. In your rush to make a difference, you trip on your own lack of perspective. Your hair-trigger attitudes are as unpredictable as they are incendiary. You smolder with violent proclivities and cast the embers to the winds. And despite your pathetic posturing, I might even buy into your pampered mendacity if I didn’t already have a front row ticket to your perpetual freak show.
You’d get what you want if your tone wasn’t so insufferably acidic—if you didn’t throw in extra syllables like you’re chambering-up more ammo; where a simple “I know” becomes an admission that you built the Ark (I know-ah) all performed in descending register for maximum effect. Is it really so hard to take “Yes” for an answer?
Blind puppies in a sack, you shuffle aimlessly through the halls; compelled to entangle us in your foul-mouthed diatribes—your manufactured dramas—your non-stop talentless auditioning. We’re invited in only to defend ourselves while you leap at the chance to kra maga your over-sized concept of personal space. It’s not that I’m offended by the way you parade your half-dressed adolescence; it’s the carefree self-indulgent effrontery—the absent-minded exhibition, that I find so disagreeable. It’s nothing but unpaved street theater; bone-jarring spectacle for the masses. Maybe if you weren’t hiding behind designer-phones and taking up my parking space, I could make some sense of your grasping lurch for celebrity. Don’t tell me what you deserve while earning my contempt.
You exude all the charm of Hannibal Lechter and wonder why I don’t throw myself on your plate. You circle the wagons around your own misconceptions and expect me to care. You cast empathy down an emotional fox-hole while insisting that I heal the bruises leftover from people touching you with ten-foot poles. I’m puzzled at what you hope to achieve by alienating those within your sphere of flatulence. The pain you inflict is needless. We all have bad days; most of us don’t expect to find relief in the open-air chaos of public humiliation. Seriously, what are you thinking? Or not?
I ignore the furtive glances that signal misdemeanor and you think because I forego, I forbear; because I forgive, I forget. You think I’m blind; but it’s you, hurrying to go nowhere like a hamster in a wheel, who truly can’t see. You get it over; but you don’t get it done. You skim the detail and skip the point. You draw to an inside straight while raging against the Deal. You adorn yourself in glitter then pursue invisibility—shut the window then curse the view. Surprise—no compromise.
And while you endeavor to avoid the ever-vigilant eye of the priggish hallway fashionistas; your “Lord of the Flies” existence extends a fleeting and flirtatious promise that one day it’ll be you that’s perched on the top rung like some lemon-harangue gargoyle. You want so desperately to matter; your self-anointed prerogative can’t come soon enough. But you never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity and I tilt at the windmill of your flapping arms. You have only yourself to blame.
We’ve reached a crossroads, you and I. While I anguish at futility of making a connection; you collude to keep us apart. While I hold out hope for your future; you fail to see past tomorrow. In the end, perhaps your frenetic lethargy and calculated coarseness will triumph. But if you are gambling that I’ll grow weary of the chase; you are betting against the house—and the odds are not in your favor. I persist—unbowed, unbroken, unrepentant—and ready for class.
Take your seat and let’s get started.
Signed:
A Teacher in Baltimore
I thought you found this on the internet; I didn’t realize you had written this yourself. If you’ve been teaching for several years, and this is how you feel, I think it’s better for you to find a new career in another field. Not attacking you-just saying this in all seriousness. My comments, also, are not meant to be an attack but a serious and thoughtful response to your post.
Your letter is nothing more than a string of insults directed toward your students in which you compare them to vampires, vipers, Nazis, lemmings, guns, Cro-Magnons, canablistic serial killers, criminals, and more. You find them both violent and pathetic. You find them insufferable and don’t seem to see any redeeming qualities in them.
Rather than feeling anything positive toward your students, you want to recoil from them, and you clearly want to return the insults you feel you get from them every day. You attack their very humanity and find “disagreeable” what kids essentially are: arrogant and self centered. They are too immature to realize they are not the be all and end all, that they didn’t invent the wheel.
You see yourself as self-righteously putting up with them, but it is your job to open up their minds, to teach them critical thinking skills, to help them mature past that childish self-centeredness. If your students lack perspective, it is your job to teach them to have it, especially as you are a social studies teacher. Instead, you abscond any responsibility for how your students behave when you should realize that it is how you conduct yourself and your class that is the answer here: they are the students, you are the teacher.
In the end of your diatribe, you say, okay, let’s get to class. You are not ready for class. And with your attitude, you students won’t be either. You compare teaching these kids to a battle. You cannot go into school each day with this kind of attitude and deal effectively with your students.
Overall, your letter is really nothing but one insult after another directed at your students. We could say this ‘letter’ is just letting off steam, but I think it is a great deal more than that. You are clearly fully frustrated and unhappy with your job. This attitude benefits no one: you cannot be an effective teacher when you feel like this. You seem to loath them, yet at the end, you expect them to come to your class to be taught by you. Would you want to be taught by someone who held only distain for you?
I think your options are 1) to get out of teaching completely, 2) to quit high school/middle school teaching and just teach at the college level, 3) to change to elementary school, grades 1-4, because the kids at that level are still mostly looking up to teachers and are cooperative, 4) teach in a private school, or 5) make huge, and I mean huge, changes in how you teach and your attitude toward your students. Teaching is at least a well honed craft, at best an art form. Maybe you are just not cut out for it. I don’t say it is easy by any means, but there are people who are just not cut our for teaching, especially at the middle school/high school level.
Your students are a reflection of how you treat them and how you engage them in learning. If you cannot find a way to make this a profitable, productive experience for either you or your students, for your own mental health and for them, just find another walk of life or teach at an altogether different level. If you stay and continue on like this, you become that hated thing toward which Americans direct their vitriol: the teacher who is just there to collect a paycheck and have summers off.
As far as your writing skills: I’ve already noted that there is little thought here, only a string of insults. As well, you over write, piling on the metaphors and similes, often mixing them, and it resembles what is called purple prose. Don’t go into journalism—maybe pulp fiction.
