Day Forty-Five: Teacher's Pet

I got something to admit right now. I LOVE being a teacher's pet. All right I'll give you a moment to scoff at me and call me names...that's cool I'll wait.




Are you done now? Ok cool. I can't help it. I love it. I love when a teacher pats me on the head and sets me up as an example in front of the class as smart and talented. I LIKE the feeling of being better than everyone else. If only for a moment. That could never be a permanent thing with me. I hate having too much attention. And frankly, I don't think I could handle being better than everyone else outside of a classroom setting. Because it's meaningless. Like...oooh good job....you have a designer bag...you're technically better than everyone else because mostly everyone else can't afford that. Kudos. But what does that really mean? Because the moment your dog chews up the lining in that bad boy the moment you won't be better than everyone else. But in the classroom...that's forever. You can't...chew up knowledge. You can't STOP being smart. I mean you can REALLY try but you really can't un-know things. So when I do a good job and a teacher makes a spectacle out of me and I look back and see everyone's pissed, annoyed faces it's euphoric. And ooh. The OTHER people like me....the other teacher's pets that want to know everything...when I get made spectacle of and they don't...the bewilderment and jealousy on their face is delicious. It's like "Oh that's right. What? Who did awesome? Who's smarter than you. That's right. Woop woop!" There's a specific red head in my Statistics class that IS my intellectual rival in the class. And I KNOW that we both equally piss off everyone around us but it's nice to have our own little competition going on in our private world.
Today in French class I got my first "plus un", which means "Plus one" in French if that wasn't obvious. Anissa was teaching us something...I can't really remember...something to do with the subjunctive....OH! Emotions. We were covering that again. And she was making us make sentences with this tense. Well basically....no one volunteers to talk a loud in that class. I get it. I know where they're coming from. I like to keep my dignity intact for the day too. But I thought, "what the hell...I hate my life enough right now anyway...so might as well". I RAISED MY HAND....which is unheard of. Anissa looked at me like I had just put on a chicken suit and ran around the classroom. I could just see her face was like, "What iz zis?" I love typing her accent. It makes me laugh. So I gave her a perfect sentence in French. Perfect. I pronounced everything right. And she looked at me with the cutest form of glee I had ever seen. She clasped her hands together and said "VERY GOOD KAY-TEE! VERY GOOD!" She ran to the board and wrote the sentence down and said "Ploos uhn, KAY-TEE!" I was like "heh heh heh". I couldn't help but smile to myself. Anissa only gives "plus un"'s when you do something really good. I guess she was like...so startled that someone volunteered to talk.
So I was kind of like, "heh heh Anissa loves me" in my head as I was walking to Statistics. It really frightens me how much I need teacher's acceptance sometimes. Actually...how much I need PEOPLE'S attention sometimes.
Well then I got to the math study hall and pulled out my homework. I am really surprised about Statistics as a class. I've heard NOTHING but horror stories about it. It's SO hard. It's IMPOSSIBLE. I think I lucked out because I got a good teacher. Lian is like a no bullshit kind of teacher. He doesn't toot his horn because he knows math and he doesn't try to MAKE you fail because he's Asian and Asian people really don't ever bring their emotional lives into their studies like fucking Americans do. This is not a fact it's just an observation. He's also a PhD graduate student so he's humble about himself. He's not a DOCTOR yet so it's like...he's not a jerk about it. I mean when he tutors you it might seem like he's talking down to you or being mean. But really it's because he doesn't speak English well. When he was tutoring me one time instead of saying "Can I see your pen?" he said "Show your pen!" He doesn't ask things really he just commands and says simple sentences in English. Which makes me laugh. I don't really mind. But I am finding Statistics to be not easy but challenging. Which is good. It's not easy for me but it's not hard. It's challenging. It gives me something to work with and it's not impossible to figure out. There are sometimes communication errors in a lesson so sometimes it takes me a few classes to figure out where he's coming from. But I usually get it. Well he gives us homework problems to do and he picks random kids each time to do them on the board.
I started working the problem and I was surprised that I got it mostly right except for a few semantic errors, where I didn't write my conclusion right or do the write notation for something. Lian was in the study hall with an exchange student from Africa. She was really struggling with the concepts and he was like....fussing at her...I didn't really know what was going on but I just did my own thing. Lian always stares at me. I can FEEL him looking at me. It's creepy. After he finished bitching out the exchange student he came over and looked over my shoulder at my homework and pointed out my few errors but told me it was correct and gave me what...I think...was some kind of praise. I don't really know. He helped me correct my other homework problem that I had misunderstood and when I was done he left and I shitted around on the computer until I went upstairs for class.
Well in class he decided that he was going to use the entire 50 minutes to go over the homework problems. He kept asking "Who wants to do number fiyoh?" and no one would do it. He saw me and said, "You. Do." and pointed the chalk at me. I guess he knew that I had the right answer already so I was like "Ok, cool." So I got up and taught the class the problem. It was a long problem and was very complicated and I was kind of afraid that I wasn't explaining it right. Red head girl in the front was FUMING. She was so pissed that I was up there doing the problems and explaining them and Lian was standing next to me nodding his head. He doesn't like to give praise much so he just said, "Thas right." And I went and sat back down. SEE? That's what I'm talking about. I love to feel intellectually special. It's just a rush.
Anyway. That's my teacher's pet confession.

End Day 45