Leave. Now.

So, today I go to class with a plan. I’m handing back papers, and they were, unfortunately, not so good. Not that they were terrible. But they weren’t great. I went into the classroom, which has a bank of 25 computers at one end and the desks at the other end. There’s a random lady at the computers, which isn’t a huge deal. Sometimes people finish things up from the class before, so that was cool. I was getting stuff together to start class, thinking about these papers that I need to hand back, wondering if there’s going to be any rage from the students (there’s never rage, but the grim look of defeat is just as difficult). I notice that the random lady isn’t leaving, so when I tell my students to gather their stuff from the desks and move to the computers, I beat ass over to the random lady and tell her in a quiet voice that she needed to please leave the classroom. She starts to gather her stuff, and I think we’re kosher.

By this time, my students are getting settled in their seats and I’m getting my stuff organized. What am I going to say to them? I need to be stern, but I want them to know that I take a small bit of responsibility for their difficulty. What could I have done better? It shakes my three-legged stool of self-confidence as a teacher when the quality of student work is low. Yep, I take it on. The lady has her stuff together and I mouth, “Thank you!” to her. She hands me a piece of notebook paper and walks out. I am literally mid-sentence: “Folks, I’m going to do something tonight that’s unprecedented. I’m going to give you back your papers at the beginning of class because we need to work through some issues I found.” I glanced down at the note, which I got the gist of before moving quickly on.

Later on, I read the note in full: “I’m sorry that I didn’t realize I was being disruptive. I wanted to let you know how much you hurt my feelings by so rudely kicking me out of the class. Thanks for putting a damper on my birthday.”

Okay, so maybe that’s not verbatim. But there were feelings being hurt and me causing a shitty birthday. Remember, I tend to take responsibility for things that aren’t my responsibility: I’m very hard on myself. So I am trying to think. Was I really that big of a jerk? Is it somehow rude of me to expect that a random stranger would leave my classroom when I was clearly going to start class? Was there a rip in the space/time continuum and I actually told her to get the hell out of the classroom before I called security, but didn’t remember it?

Then I realized what the problem was. I was not, indeed, nice. I wasn’t nice at all. I was, however, being professional. Businesslike. After all, I’m being paid to teach a class. When I’m in a classroom, that classroom belongs to me and my students. No one else. I tend to be protective of the particular vibe I cultivate in my classroom. The vibe is delicate. Random strangers screw up the vibe. So yeah, I wanted her out. So I asked her. I even said please. So I’m not to blame here, and the question then becomes, who writes a mean note, anyway? No one writes mean notes, at least no one out of high school writes mean notes. And this lady was middle-aged. I think when it comes down to it, we can safely blame this on social inappropriateness. That’s fair, right?

The interesting thing is, though, that this mean note still made me feel bad, bad enough to have the patience of a saint when I finally asked my students to rework their Works Cited pages because they were, essentially, bad. Man I was nice tonight. Really, really nice. As a matter of fact, it ended up feeling really good. Sometimes I am not as patient. Answering literally twenty questions (at least) about MLA documentation in about twenty minutes is not simple, and I am proud of helping everyone who needed it. And with a calm, patient voice. Sometimes nice pays, and some situations call for business, like when an outsider is trying to infringe on the sacred barrier of the classroom.