Teacher vs. Friend: A Balancing Act

I am a young and relatively 'hip' teacher. I like being on good terms with my students but I am not about to be walked all over. I am all for mutual respect. Mutual. So often student expect me to bend to their every whim, and I mostly will, on the condition they in turn make my life easy. If you are incessant, annoying or can't catch a hint, we gonna have a prollem.

The best compliment I have received to date was from a African American (this is a relavent detail) student named Josh. He is a big person with a bigger personality. I am constantly asking him to be quiet, or pay attention and I am often met with attitude. Attitude is something I don't do well with. Mostly because there is only enough room in my class for one attitude and that's reserved for mine. So when it is directed at me I call the student out on it. Well Josh can handle a little backlash and one day after finally getting him to submit to the class routine he said 'Ms. Kern. You're like a black lady. Like, sometimes I'm scared of you, like I am of black ladies'. No sarcasm, best day of my life. 

I have decent rapport with my students. They say hi in the halls, they aren't afraid to come ask for help or favors and they often tell me how much they like my class. This is awesome, but I am a firm believer that being friends with students in a convenience, not a necessity. So, I am not afraid to be the 'bad guy'. 

Example: sometimes I have students come crowd around my desk. Scratch that, I ALWAYS have students come crowd around my desk. Sometimes it's for homework help, or they were absent or they just want to talk and see what my opinion is and sometimes they just plain try to irritate me. Seventh period, there are about 4 boys who've made it their mission to accomplish the latter.  

Recently, right at the end of day, one of those students decided to allow his natural idiot to squelch whatever critical thinking skills he might have possessed. This is a common occurrence amongst ninth grade boys. This particular student shut off all mature thought to the point where I had to (through a series of events and poorly thought out actions on his part) end up writing him up to the VP and he had to have a talking to.

Yes. I'm one of those teachers. 

I don't want to incriminate this student and I am all for letting water flow right under that bridge, especially since he came and apologized before school the next day and I thought we were all good. 

Seventh period rolled around and all his little buddies came in and said 'MS. KERN. How could you?!' Then he came in and was all moody and didn't speak a word the entire time. All his little friends were super quiet too. They raised their hands when they had something to say and when I told them to sit down they did. It was heavenly. The boy in question was acting like we had just gone through some nasty break-up and he couldn't even bare to look at me. All I could think was 'HALLELUJAH'. This is the best they had been since I started teaching their class. Then once the bell rang for the end of school, they all left immediately. No hanging around messing with my stapler, no taking forever getting their stuff together, they were gone before I had a chance to tell them I would see them tomorrow. I have yet to feel bad about their reactions.

This is a lesson every teacher has to learn for themselves. There is a fine line between teacher and friend. Teachers care about their students more than I think they will ever realize. We notice when they are picked on, or struggling and we live to see them succeed (especially in our subject). Consequently, friends do all of those things too. The difference is one is an authority figure and has the right and duty to discipline as necessary. Being a young teacher, this is a hard balance to find let alone maintain and feelings are bound to get hurt in the process.

But dang it, I got 120 too-cool-to-show-emotion teenagers to write some incredible love poems only to have them follow up with equally awesome spoken word poems. Experiences like reading and responding to all of those makes being their teacher worth every minute.

The Girl Code

Best Friends. We all have them. Someone who is our confidant and knows everything that has to do with our lives, whether it be what color your nail polish is or what you have been craving for the last three days. Best friends just tend to know everything about our lives. We all need a sounding board and a verbal disposal system which enables us to clear those petty and inconsequential thoughts without hesitation. This is known within the female community, or at least the female community I've always interacted with (albeit I am barely an 'adult' and still love knowing every detail of everybody's lives). I may be the exception, but I am pretty positive this is more the case than not. Regardless, this inevitability has not always been appreciated by those I have dated. 

Once upon a time I was a freshman in college and I started casually dating a 'preemie' (a boy who had yet to go a mission in BYUI lingo). This boy, I'll call him Larz for privacy reasons, was a nice, thoughtful boy who I had had a crush on but immediately after becoming 'exclusive' with him realized that I was not exactly as interested as I had perhaps made him perceive (I was a freshman, give me a break). Anyway Larz and I were having a conversation about three weeks into our relationship (the whole debacle lasted about five weeks, for soon to be obvious reasons) and I told him that my roommate knew everything about everything concerning me at the time, this included him. Our conversation went as follows:

Larz: No, something’s need to stay between the couple.

Me: Sure, when they're engaged or married, not when they're just dating.

Larz: No, even when they are dating, things should stay between them.

Me: Every girl does it, it's no big deal, it's not like it changes anything.

Larz: So you have told your roommate everything about us.

Me: Yeah, basically.

Larz: No! (Getting visibly upset) You can't tell her everything!

Me: Ok ok, I haven't told her everything...

Larz: K, good. 

A conversation change promptly ensued and it was never brought up again. I had in fact told my roommate everything (it was as juicy as a couple of dinner dates, an awkward first kiss and a rose with a note left for me while I was out of town) but he was satiated by my blatant fabrication of truth within one fleeting comment inserted in an entire conversation of actual truth. Which I told my roommate about the minute I got home.

I would be lying if I said I hadn't come from a date and immediately gave every last detail to at least two of my roommates and then called or texted at least one of my other friends to let them know what happened too. And I have been on the receiving end more times than I count as well. We eat this stuff up.

Point being, this happens. And it happens a lot. My dear gentleman readers, I apologize, though not very sincerely, for this annoyance concerning your personal life. Chances are, if you are in a relationship, you and your significant other are far from the only ones who know every detail.




But if it makes you feel any better, from a best friends perspective, we promise we won't tell.

'Be My Horcursh'

And as usual, Harry Potter makes even the most dreaded holidays awesome.

(Compliments of iwastesomuchtime.com)

Dear Abby

I read Dear Abby almost daily and I have for years.

Now that that's out in the open, I just have something to say about it.

The daughter that took over in Abby's stead is really mean. And not funny mean, she is mean mean. For instance, just today a woman wrote in and said that she felt that her mother-in-law had violated her and she was wondering if she was justified. One thing that disturbed her is that whenever the mother-in-law came to visit she demanded to stay in the master bedroom. Abby said something along the lines of 'until she is sleeping between you and her son in your bed you don't have any reason to be upset' and 'stop being so sensitive'. She could've have said, 'turn the other cheek', 'make your guest room awesome so that she would rather stay there' or 'just give her some space'. There is a plethora of kinder more sympathetic things to say. But since when was the daily newspaper a place for sympathy? (That's what I imagine she would say if she read this). I just want to know why Abby Jr. has to be so rude, may I mention this is just one occurrence of which I assure you there have been many. So I have briefly thought of a couple different options.

1. She feels as though she is compensating for the fact her name is actually Jeanne.

2. Abby c/o Jeanne is sick of the family business and has become very irritable and impatient with the general public's inability to decided whether or not it is appropriate to bring their own allergy friendly hors d'ourves to a dinner party.

or 3. Jeanne is just a mean person not fit to be printed but managed slip in through a neglected legacy column.

No matter what the actual cause of Abby's harsh words, she is a mean girl. If I were to write in to her column I would say:

Dear Abby, 
Since it has become painfully obvious that you completely neglect the social necessity of tact, I have taken the liberty of enclosing the definition in hopes that you will incorporate it to your daily writings and life. If your writing says anything about your personality, I can only imagine the color of your day to day conversations.


Tact. Noun. A keen sense of what to say or do to avoid giving offense; skill in dealing with difficult or delicate situations.
-Saying what everyone is thinking out West.


But that's just me. Read the column and find out for yourself. It's usually in the C section of the Desert News right around the comics, aka the other part of the newspaper I read almost daily which has conveniently filled the void since I no longer read the obituaries.

Extreme Makeover: Room Edition

This post has been in the works for a really long time. I redid my room this summer, when I moved home semi-permanently, with immense help from my mom. My room's appearance took 180 turn. The last time it was done, I was eight. My mom and aunt worked together to sponge the walls dusty pink, my mom picked out bedding, made curtains and chose wall paper which made up my room from 1998 until April 2011. That's a long time. Needless to say, the room had many degrees as I grew up, toys and coloring supplies turned to clothes and makeup and then books and shoes.

Those who know me know that I like bright colors, I am fairly eclectic but also like a simplicity to things. When I moved home, being an almost college grad, my mom let me have free reign on my walls and so forth, choosing colors, paint and all the rest. Sometimes this made her very nervous. Like when I told her I wanted my walls to be a vibrant shade spring green. I also have collected many decorations and wall things while living on my own and I wanted to incorporate all of them regardless of color (my other colors were a steel blue and a jalapeno red with a bird motif). But she let me have my way nonetheless and the finished product is everything I imagined. I didn't have to do without any of my beloved decorating items and I love every aspect of my 'new' room.

In true reality TV fashion, I forgot to take pictures of my room before we started dismantling it, so the before pictures make my room look like a total train wreck with lots of things already moved out plus, I didn't really bother moving back in because we started the makeover as soon as I moved home. So take the' before' pictures with a grain of salt.

Dusty Rose:

Messy messy messy

My poor disheveled bookcase

Inventory of what we did: stripped walls of paper, painted and stenciled walls, new frames and matts for my 'coming of age' pictures (taken when I was 8, 12, 16 and 20) new bed and bedding, new nobs for dresser, painted desk, hung all my various decorations, got all my books into mostly the same place, new bed side table, new lamps and shades, my mom made a new curtain thing and pillows that incorporated the red I wanted and courtesy of my dad, my 2:4 ratio of working outlets improved to 4:4. 

My New Room:

When my dad got home from work after we'd put on the first coat of green, I asked him what he thought, he said '.....looks.....creative!' After the rest was done he said it looks great and is by no means overwhelming.

Trinkets from school I am by no means ready to part with.

Look at all my books! Quite possibly my favorite part of my room.

My desk 

I got that clock for .75 cents at a garage sale. Best purchase ever.

Three birds framed, inspired by a picture on pinterest. Sometime they do work out!

And by some miracle, my dusty rose chair still works.

Many more trinkets and pictures.

So there you have it! A new room for not that expensive. Granted it took a couple of weeks to get everything completely done, but I love it! Totally worth the wait.

And to finish it off, here is my nephew being awesome in 3D glasses.

Cooking Shows

Ever wonder when watching a cooking show if what the over-energized, perfectly quaffed person made went terribly wrong and actually tasted disgusting? But they had to keep a straight face when taste testing cause they just spent the last half hour chopping the rutabaga into perfect hexagons?

I do.

HARRY POTTER

I am a major Harry Potter nerd. I love it. If you don't love it, I don't want to hear about, you don't know what you are missing out on and should probably just stop reading, nothing past this point will make any sense.

Did anyone else get completely duped by Snape and didn't realize until the seventh book that he really was on the good side? I was. I thought he was such a scab and didn't deserve the air he breathed and then the seventh book happened and I was like 'Oh, my bad, you are an ok person even if you were really greasy sometimes' (but I LOVE the whole secret love story so so much). Well I just finished rereading the fourth book and realized that there is proof that shows Snape's true character, all the way back then. I just have to share it. I'll set the scene.

After the third task in the Tri-Wizard tournament, Barty Crouch Jr. who is disguised as Mad Eye Moody takes Harry into his office to interrogate him. While questioning Harry, Barty doesn't realize that Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape are coming in, but Harry is aware because of a fun little contraption in Moody's office called a Foe-Glass, which lets you know if there is an enemy approaching. Well, Dumbledore forces the door open and stuns Barty, then

"[Dumbledore] stepped into the office, placed a foot beneath Moody's unconscious body, and kicked him over onto his back, so that his face was visible. Snape followed him, looking into the Foe-Glass, where is own face was still visible, glaring into the room."

WHY THE HECK WOULD SNAPE BE SEEN AS AN ENEMY TO A DEATH EATER IF HE WAS A DEATH EATER HIMSELF?!?

Book Four people. JK Rowling is a brilliant genius.

And whether period drama or fantastical series, I will always love Alan Rickman.