I am not the most respectful person. I will not, under any circumstances, respect an adult simply because they are an adult and automatically gain the right of my approval. My main problem in school is simply dealing with teachers who have their heads up their asses and believe that because they are at the front of the room they are in charge of students' thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Fuck them all, is my motto. Teachers suck.
There is a story behind this, besides the obvious draining of all my individuality after almost ten years in school. It all boils down to one particular Spanish class and a man who has this odd notion that he is a teacher. Right. And I'm a Republican.
We don't actually have a Spanish teacher or an offial Spanish program at my school. Last year we had an awesome teacher who, although it pains me to say, actually inspired me to learn under the school's jurisdiction. Because of him, and an overly populated German class, I decided to take Spanish. Just my luck, the good Spanish teacher left the school, and no one was found to be a replacement.
So that's how Mr. Lopez came along. The theory of our new Spanish program was that Mr. Lopez would run the VCR and we would wach tapes from Virginia teaching us the language. Nice theory. As it turned out, the tapes were incredibly boring and Mr. Lopez decided to take it upon himself to teach us his "caveman" Spanish.
Legally, he is not allowed to teach. He does so by giving us quizzes, asking for oral reports, real reports, and telling us to do pages of vocabulary every now and then. Exiting, really. Sometimes we even watch the tapes which we are legally bound to view. The tax payers of our town pay $350 for each of the nine kids in the class to be part of a program that we only do one fourth of the time. We know minimul Spanish, and by minimul I mean that our knowledge doens't go beyond hola and adios. I'm ready for the working world, yea...
This Mr. Lopez is also just dumb. I often have to give him advice on test arrangements, etc. simply because he doens't know what the hell he's doing. We spent two weeks working on a stupid report about Spanish artists after we watched a movie. We saw the movie three times so that we could do all three of the worksheets. We wasted two and a half weeks of time on men I don't care or remember anything about. On top of that, when he gave us a quiz that he created, I got a better grade than he did. Admittedly, it was only a two point difference, but for christ's sake man, he created the damn thing!
Keeping in mind my complete hatred for this class and man, we arrive at today's lesson. We were finally watching a tape, and though it was from October 22nd and we are supposed to be in January, I was happy that we were actually attempting to learn.
Before we began Mr. Lopez sat down with our class to have a little 'heart to heart.' It went something like this (Mr. Lopez is in blue, I'm in purple):
"In the book we're on page 136 or so but this tape is somewhere around page 120. After we watch today's lesson we have a choice to skip ahead to the tape around page 136, or continue to watch."
"Well, we should watch all the tapes to actually learn the material instead of looking only at the vocabulary."
"You didn't let me finish. For all of those people who want to get more A's we can also watch all the tapes even though we covered that." (At that point I turned to my friend and said,)
"It's not a matter of getting A's, it's a matter of doing more than skimming the material, but actually learning it."
"If you're going to be disrespectful than you can go out of the room for today's lesson instead of watching the tape." At this point I turned around to my other friend and nodded my head, smiling, because leaving Spanish had been a great subject of choice for the past few weeks. "Excuse me, you can leave the class if you are going to be that disrespectful. Do you want to leave?"
This was a point of great contemplation in my mind. Go to the principal and explain the situation, or wait it out and bitch later. I chose the latter. I remembered what happened to my friend when he went to the prinipal, and Mr. Lopez flat out lied to him. I didn't want to deal with that, and figured that if I went on my own free will I would have the upper hand.
So I sat out the class, probably to my advantage, stirring thoughts of guns and how much I really do hate this town. The point of this isn't that our Spanish class is crap or even my hatred towards all teachers (except for a select few), it is simply that I refuse to respect adults unless they give me a reason to. I will not limit my comments to what is not 'disrespectful' when I do not respect anything about the man. Why are children expected to automatically listen to everything that adults say? My mom never required me to deal with that 'talking back' shit, but everytime I hear someone say that it makes me want to take their tongue and turn them into something useful, like a toaster. I will not stop 'talking back' and I will not pretend to respect any teacher or adult. (I also don't like the implication that the only reason I want to watch the tapes is to get A's. What the hell, the class is a walk. I have a fricken' hundred average from all the extrenuating vocabulary that we do. He's a bright, bright man.)
Senoir Lopez es mucho ass.