So this girl walks up to me before lunch.
"Have you been having problems with [Girl A]?" She is unsettlingly direct. I pull her aside.
"Why, what's going on?"
"She keeps telling everyone that she hates you, and that she pretends to be busy after class so that she doesn't have to stay in."
"I've never asked her to stay in."
"Oh."
"Well, thanks for the heads up."
I grab my lunch from the staff fridge and head out to church, hoping that I can catch up with the Boy before he goes off to work. All of the joy has gone out of my day; not that there was all that much to begin with. I laugh a little, thinking that there's probably a reason we don't spend any time on 'what to do if a student hates you.' I think about all the students last year who would've hated me if they could've worked up the energy. I think about Machiavelli, and how it is better to be feared than loved. Unfortunately, I am neither.
I figured it out after lunch, though. As I was walking by, a student smacked me accidentally with a flailing limb. We laughed it off, but when the rest of the class began to laugh, it wasn't with me. This class wants to hurt me. Why? Because the alpha male is a malevolent kid, and he enjoys being cruel to me. So, to impress him, the girls - and Girl A in particular - talk about how much they hate me. QED.
I need to think about how I can change this. I took several hits today by playing passive. Obviously that's not going to hold up over the long run.
* * *
2 years ago today: we started off training with a 15-minute discussion of boots and Toronto clubs.
