For the past three days, I have been participating in 8-hour classes preparing me to teach AP Language and Comp. There are only four students, including myself, and a teacher. After having been a student in a high school classroom for the last three days, I’ve got some thoughts:

1. Teachers are terrible students. We have side conversations. We’re on our phones. We don't pay attention. I’ve made this observation ever since I became a teacher. It is some pretty hilarious and hypocritical situational irony.
2. It’s hard warming a chair all day. After each day of training, I come home mentally exhausted. There is simply so much information to digest. The fact that many of you finish school, participate in sports practice for several hours, then do several hours of homework is impressive. While you all undoubtedly have much sharper, growing brains than I do, full-time school in a classroom, in addition to other responsibilities, is no joke. You ought to congratulate yourself for relentlessly grinding through 9 months of school
3. Peers and teachers can be irritating. For instance, when a student only wants to talk about his/her personal experience instead of the topic at hand, it can derail the whole class and waste an hour. The same can happen with teachers. Our teacher is this sweet retired teacher/grandma lady from the Midwest. She’s lovely but often goes on tangents by sharing personal anecdotes. As the king of tangents and anecdotes, I’m sorry. I imagine many of you spent days in my class bored out of your mind desperately praying I'd stop talking about myself. I gotta trim down the stories and only share the really interesting ones. Also, people who interrupt are super, super irritating. If you are not given the time to fully develop your thought before someone jumps in with their own, it makes your ideas seem unimportant. That hurts. If I interrupted you this year, I’m sorry.
4. Patience and compassion are valuable traits. I could tell by the end of today, when the rest of my peers had lost interest and started packing up their stuff before class was over, that the teacher was hurt. Even though I too was desperate to go home and totally burned out, the ability to sit quietly and give your attention to another person is a real gift, especially in a classroom setting. Likewise, when a teacher or peer is telling yet ANOTHER personal story that’s not at all related to the task at hand, by realizing that this person wants to be heard and by listening attentively, you demonstrate a silent, powerful form of compassion.

Anyhow, this is purely my ramblings. Hopefully, NONE of you are thinking about the dynamics of the classroom, but are busy having an epic summer instead. Freshmen Sophomores, thank you again for being so respectful in class this year.