squeeze

I want you to understand,

especially on days when I feel most vulnerably human, and I have been sad since I woke up, and when I know that you do not think or perhaps you do not even believe that I have a life outside the role you see me in, and, since I'm seeing you linger outside the classroom door and you've been there for half the class waiting for me to come over to you, rage and not pity makes my heart skip fast beats in my chest and I really do not want to have to remember that you will believe, for whatever reason, that I am not me but, instead, your parole officer or absent father or jerk older brother or perhaps you have confused me with an interested therapist or forgiving priest or kind reverend or, in its most surreal manifestation, homosocial homeboy;

especially on days when it is all of this combined with the fact that you have suddenly realized with utter shock that, yes: you are going to fail despite the countless times I have stayed after class and spoken with you one-on-one (alternating quiet concern and hopeful enthusiasm or brass tacks honesty) about the critical importance of reading and writing well or, if not this, then at least the importance of shaking bad habits, and despite the time I took to clearly and sensitively make positive suggestions on your essays so much so that I actually got up in the middle of grading one of your papers to move away from it -- I was so pissed that you seemed to have forgotten everything I had taught you in the last two weeks and you reverted to positively annoying text-messaging/email language -- because, deep down, I believe that no one deserves to feel that wrath of misplaced anger (how easy and deliciously cruel it would have been to have crossed it all out and written in crazed capital letters in your too-big margins ARE YOU A COMPLETE MORON??) and because I need to teach and not be angry at you;

especially when you start to tell me I have done you wrong or tricked you or lied or ruined your life or your chance at success in the world, and when you begin to cry and tell me how hard you have tried, that you have quote not even gone to church on sundays just so you could work on this unquote, it is so hard not to listen to a tiny voice that says, "I saw this coming on the first day of class," and then hear how quickly the second voice says "Don't think that -- what good does it do?"; but I still remain with you and allow you to project all of your hatred onto me for a full twenty-minutes because, I am telling myself, you need to do this and it doesn't really matter if it stings a little bit, after all, in another hour I'll be sitting in a meeting discussing something administrative and this whole thing will be another part of a longer day that, surely, will not prevent me from sleeping or from cursing someone like Rod Paige or the increasingly popular (and totally iditotic) idea that active learning in the writing classroom means giving students something called "clickers" with which they can play a kind of video game to answer questions about grammar when the whole point, in my estimation, is to tear students away from point-and-click reward systems and have them think out loud, discuss, write, and revise their ideas with a circle of people that, eventually, become part of their intellectual community;

that I am on your side, and that I am working my best to figure out how to do this without either of us getting crushed in the squeeze.