No Sympathy.

I remember several times during my student career where a teacher would tell the class things like:

• "I'm behind on grading."
  
• "I'm going to have to spend the whole weekend reading your papers."
  
• "I looked all around town to find (x object) for you."
  
• "Do you know how long this took me??"
  

Do you remember teachers telling you things like this? I don't know about your reactions, but when I heard comments like this, I would think things like the following:

• It's your job. Get over it.
  
• After saying up until 2 am writing that paper, I don't really care if you loose some sleep over it, too.
• You can't complain about grading homework that I didn't want to do anyway considering you were the one who assigned it.

I was scrambling this week to get grades caught up. Yes, I was behind in grading. And yes, I actually told this to a couple of classes--but in my defense, it was more to explain why their grades weren't all current when they looked them up, and NOT to ask for their sympathy.

Having been a student myself, I can understand that I won't ever get sympathy from the students. But thinking about the teacher-student relationship, it's no wonder. I mean, teachers are to students...what would be a good analogy? God? We don't just tell students what they have to do, but we pass jugement on how well they do it, too. No wonder it's strange to see your teacher at the grocery store.

Now living life on the teacher side, though, I'm starting to realize that teachers really aren't that scary. We're just people, actually. And it seems to be that it's the ones who care the most who will get involved enough that they take papers home on the weekend or to spend their precious spare time on their students.

Not that that will change anything. Or that it should.