I met with two adult students today, businesswomen who’re motivated, funny and at least a little curious. We talked about the class I could offer them and they were excited about the ideas I had, it was awesome…

Then I went to my kids school, I prepared my lessons I was there well ahead of time as I always am. I got everything ready and checked my email. Then I came back down and they’ve all arrived half an hour early, foisted on us by parents who don’t want to be parenting, the boss allows this even though it is a clear abuse of the schools kindness.

It is an annoyance but up until recently it hadn’t been a problem for me. But today as on many recent days my boss asks me about the kids homework which they can’t do, I do my best to simply ignore this. I’ve clearly explained that the homework is reviewed and corrected every day in class, that I don’t expect them all to be able to do it every time, that it takes time with kids especially first graders.

I go in to prepare my class doing my best to drop the stress that has been pushed on me. I glance at their homework and every bit of it is translation, every bit of it asks the students to know the Mandarin Chinese words and match them with English words and how much time do you think I spend on teaching the kids Chinese words?

If you guessed absolutely, fucking zero you guessed right.

The kids have illustrated books which show the vocabulary and in the case of our recent curriculum, prepositions of place, we’ve been playing games getting them to move about based on the preposition I tell them, drawing pictures based on the prepositions and describing pictures using the prepositions.

All of this is designed to associate the English words with the idea of the preposition that is communicated in the picture and by moving their bodies, all of this engages their brains in multiple ways because this is the way I’ve been taught to teach language, because I don’t have an assistant to translate for me and because I’m not a motherfucking Chinese teacher.

I mention this to politely to my boss and she listens but then says, “Well shouldn’t they know the Chinese word?”

And what I should say is, “No shit they should know the Chinese word, they have word lists to look that shit up on and a whole fucking nation to teach them the Chinese word, so I guess they should know it and you shouldn’t bug me the ENGLISH teacher about them not knowing the Chinese word.”

All I can say is, “Okay, I’ll teach them to translate.”

And people wonder why I say that teaching kids is the most thankless, pointless, annoying waste of time I’ve ever been engaged in.

Now as I write this I’ve got a headache, from teaching three classes of kids in a row and from feeling negative about all of it. The surface point is that I never want to teach kids, again, in any capacity, the deeper point is that we all need to learn how to let the stress other people try to hand us fall flat on their fucking feet. Because as soon as we take on other people’s stress we’re dragged down by it the same way they are. By taking on stress we multiply stress which doesn’t benefit anyone.

This has been one of the great lessons I’ve had from this year, refuse the stress of others make them grow up and deal with it. At the same time do not pass your stress on to others, grow up and deal with it yourself.

I have enjoyed many things about this past year but with three months left on my contract I’d like nothing better than to be able to wash my hands of it right now… I don’t have that luxury so I’ll do my best and then let it go.