How are you feeling right now?

I’m not.

Not good.

I’m disappointed.

I feel empty and betrayed. 

I came into this school year excited. I spent most of my summer planning out interesting ways to teach genres and trailer concepts to my students. I started with horror and built it from the start of the genre.But it seemed that, since I wasn’t dancing for TikTok or breaking up my lecture into two minute dopamine hits, a small amount tuned me out. Usually that is fine, but these students are loudest with their opinions. They are the ones who cause the most chaos. 

It sucks to have to fight with teenagers just to get them to stop talking. Hearing groan after groan makes my skin crawl. A few of these students switched into my class because they didn’t want to be in the other class. I don’t know what they expected from me. But it wasn’t to sit and listen to them bitch and moan. We are at school. You have to learn. Instead of watching trailers to watch the evolution of the genre and have all the pieces broken down, they could just read a textbook. I promise that would suck.

I started the week explaining how I stopped watching horror when I began working in news. There isn’t anything a filmmaker could create that is worse than what humans actually do. So on Thursday, the day after a monster shot up a Catholic school while children prayed at mass, I broke. 

I didn’t want to talk about death and destruction. 

I wanted to be distracted by what my students were planning to create. So as the juniors went off to their class meeting about rings, I spoke with my seniors about what the next two months looked like. Those who had me before were amazing. Scripts were already being planned out and teams built. But again there were a few who thought my class was a fuck around class. 

I hate it.

I will not be up the kids’ asses.

It doesn’t work for my class. 

My upperclassmen usually know that when I am giving them freedom, they are working one way or another. But some believe they must use their phones, shouting out things. I didn’t have the energy to fight yesterday. I just let those continue to make the same mistake over and over again. I hoped that I wasn’t going to have to collect phones from the almost adults, but it looks like I’ll be treating the majority like freshmen because the loud few can’t respect rules. 

I thought that was going to be the worst. Until a handful of my trusted kids broke my trust. I am not spelling out ‌what they did because it will be blatant who I am talking about. I have enough students who read my blogs and stalk my Instagram that they will know who I am talking about. But when people go back on their word and I find out, they are burned. There is not enough time in the school year for them to earn it back. They will graduate soon, and the years of trust that had been built has shattered. 

It sucks because I am here to listen to my students’ trauma dump all over me when they have problems. I help them with their classwork, look for jobs, scholarships, and things that are more than just teaching TV Production. If they had that elsewhere, they wouldn’t be asking me. I am not jaded in my belief that everyone has a stable home life or that they have an adult to seek guidance from. But because of that, I think they have forgotten I am the adult. I am not their peer. The disrespect has festered, and I am over it. 

So that is how I am feeling right now. 

I need a three day weekend to decompress without looking at a single email from parents accusing me of trying to fail their student because their child did not turn in work.