Irene's Weblog

There is one student in class that really gets on my nerves.  He always believes that he’s right and comes up with the weirdest ideas.  Today, I finally found out where he got the strangest of his ideas.  I have argued often with him, but to no avail.

For lunch today, I ate in the classroom with another student and teacher.  This student’s mother and father came to school to eat with him, his brother, and his sister.  When surrounded by such people, it is always best to keep your mouth shut.  We had been discussing several things, including the fact that the mother was from the East Coast.  The major topic, of course, turned to foods that we missed.

Proper pizza is a bone of contention for anyone who grew up on it and then is forced to live in a place where the people only know Pizza Hut, Dominos, and Papa John’s.  This is not real pizza!  Then, the mother said it.  Word for word.  Exactly as her son had been repeating to me.

“You know, it’s the strangest thing.  You’d think that because Pizza came from Italy, they’d eat it there.  But no one in Italy eats pizza.”

I nearly choked on my carrot.  I know my eyebrows squooshed down and the teacher who was eating lunch with me gave me a “what the fuck is she talking about?” look.  I clenched my teeth. I tried not to respond.  It was difficult, but, luckily, other people came into the room and the topic moved on.

A few minutes later, everyone left the room, except for myself and the other teacher.  She looked at me and, before she could say anything, I responded, “I know.  It’s not like I ate pizza as a snack every day when I was in Italy.  It’s not like I’ve actually been to Italy three time.  Oh, and I probably wasn’t really eating pizza when I went into the shop next to the Duomo every time I visit Florence either.”

“Have you ever visited the Bastille?” was the question put to me in class by the teacher.  We are reading a story about France and the teacher was talking about the French Revolution, which was way off topic to the story.  It’s a great story, called The Necklace, and I’m not even sure how we got onto the topic of the Bastille, but there it was.

“Uh, no,” I responded with a puzzled look on my face.  “but I have walked past the spot where it was.”

“Oh, so you’ve never been in it?”

“No, dumbass,” was what I wanted to say.  Instead, I said, “Nope.”  I wondered to myself as to whether or not this guy was as stupid as I thought or if he was winding me up.  I went with choice A.  This teacher is a nice guy, but he has some really weird ideas about things sometimes.

“Wow, I would love to go inside and see it.  Imagine all the history that is there.”  He went on about how great a visit to the Bastille would be.  I secretly agreed, but only because, in order to do it, time travel would actually have to exist and that would be far cooler than visiting a musty old prison.

Today was quite interesting at work.  There was a substitute teacher today, which is not surprising as the regular teacher seems to take every opportunity to get time off.  What is surprising, and something I keep coming across, is how ignorant a lot of people are about a lot of things.  We were watching a movie based one of the stories we had read.

The father in the story was fighting in WWI and the substitute teacher exclaimed,  “This movie was made during WWI.”  Well, no it wasn’t.  It was made in the late 90′s, but it’s set during WWI.  I figured I wouldn’t quibble over that, as it was probably just a misspoken statement.

Then she said, “Do you know how you can tell that it’s WWI?”  I waited to see if any of the fifth graders knew why.  I suspected answers would explain the uniforms, possibly the types of guns or tanks.  I even expected someone to yell that their story had actually put a date in it and explained what year it was and what was happening.

Silence.  None of the kids spoke up.  After several more moments, the substitute teacher spoke up.  “Look.  They’re in trench warfare.  There was no trench warfare in WWII.  There wasn’t ever trench warfare except in WWI.  No one else has ever used it.”

I put my head down and shook it gently from side to side.  I rested my head in my left hand, sighed, knowing that nothing I said would change this woman’s mind.  I’d worked with, and argued with her before.  I sighed again and ran my fingers through my hair, exhaled and went back to watching the movie.

One of the students in class today asked the teacher, “Did you know that tanks weren’t made until the 1980′s?”

I chuckled a bit and the teacher responded, Uh, no, XXXXXX, that’s not true. They were around much earlier than that.”

“Well then, they weren’t fixed right until the 1980′s because no one could use them correctly.”

The teacher rolled his eyes and said, “Okay, well, getting back to the lesson…”

What the hell is wrong with these children? There are at least five nosepickers in class. Worst of all, they’re booger eaters.

WTF? Get a damn tissue!