My Tuesday class was cancelled for preceptor meetings, so I am all thrown off. I missed an online payment, put my trash out a day early, and keep thinking tomorrow is Saturday. I mean, by the time you read this tomorrow IS Saturday, but I am writing this on Thursday, so tomorrow is Friday. Oh, and my last blog post for the week is a story with no point. Fascinated yet?
Here it is:
I used to teach with an insipid woman who liked to say, “You go, girl!” to the female staff. It drove me up a fucking wall. Like, maybe a woman would be enjoying a donut on Teacher Appreciation Day.
“You go, girl!”
Maybe I would be having an animated conversation with a male student in the hallway.
“You go, girl!”
Maybe I’d be teaching, and my class would erupt with laughter, and she’d be walking by:
“You go, girl!”
Maybe a female administrator or guidance counselor would be gently laying down the law about an infraction to someone in the hallway.
“You go, girl!”
I even heard her once say it to the toughest female security guard I’ve ever known. If you’re reading this and you taught with me, you know who she is. She was no one’s fool, and no one, I repeat, NO ONE, escaped her wrath. After a 35-year career as a security guard, what she said, WENT. It was her school, after all. Faculty, students, administrators, secretaries, alumni- everyone tiptoed around her, and followed the rules. I don’t know who was more afraid of her when she would appear at my classroom door- the students or me.
One morning I was working the front door with her, and she was upbraiding a student who had been late to school for the third time that week. This kid had his head hung so low his nose was brushing against his knees. She was doing her regular spiel:
“Get here. Don’t give me that, I don’t care what you have going on at home, it’s your job to get here. Get a ride. Set three alarms. Sleep in your clothes. You’re in charge of getting here, no one else should have that responsibility. You either want to get an education or you don’t.”
She was tough, tough, tough. And as she sent him on his way to class, she turned to me and began to shake her head, mumbling something about “these kids don’t have any sense of personal responsibility…” when suddenly out of nowhere…
“YOU GO, GIRL!”
Oh, no. Oh, yes. That insipid moron had just “You go girl”ed the most intimidating human being in our building. The guard just stared at this woman, and I swear to God if looks could kill, “You-Go-Girl” girl would have been six-feet under.
Her “You go girl” shit made everyone cringe, because “You Go, Girl!” didn’t seem to be as much of a positive affirmation as it was demeaning to the female staff. And “You-Go-Girl” girls never change. If they “You Go Girl” when they’re 18, they’ll do it when they’re 45.
Final part of story:
When I teach in the mornings, I can see and hear a group of female students chatting and waiting to get into their classroom. When I leave, I walk right through them, and because of her faculty credentials, I know which one is the professor. She is young and chatty, and I can hear her trying to sound like them. I want to warn her to stop.
Please stop. Don’t become friends with your students. We all make that mistake at some points in our career, but get rid of the habit early, rather than later, and you’ll make your life much easier.
But twice a week, I can hear them tearing down this woman’s personal boundaries. Looking at the pictures on her phone, ooh-ing and ahhiing over her cat pictures, scrutinizing her outfits. And every week she becomes more and more outwardly uncomfortable with it. Finally today, it happened just like I knew it would.
I was walking through their group, and the professor came into the hallway from outside. As soon as they spotted her, three of her female students shrieked:
“OMG, those glasses are sooooooooo cuuuuuuuuute!”
“Whoa, look out, hot stuff!”
“You look soooooo awwwwwwesome!”
Her smile as she walked into that pink melee was strained, but I felt no pity for her. She had brought it on herself through weeks of self-immolation, and humoring their questions about her husband, and her vacations, and her personal life.
As I swung the door open to go out into the fresh air, I heard it from behind me.
“YOU GO, GIRL!”
She will never have control of that class again.