Sunday, November 26, 2006

Hooker by name, Hooker by profession

A while ago, a friend recounted this analogy- that teachers were by far like hookers. And we're not talking about that small minority of teachers that seem to give the profession a bad name when they actually screw around with students, literally speaking ( I must however also add that not all students are as innocent as the Powers That Be imagine them to be though.).

Anyway, the analogy goes as this. We are like hookers because we give and we give and we give, we get paid pittance, we have pimps that generally force us to do what we don't want to do, we always have to put on a song and a dance regardless of how battered or horrid we feel. And at the end of all that, when the clients see us on the street, they pretend not to know us at all, look and walk in the opposite direction.

I laughed when I first heard it but there is some sad truth in it. Together with the inability to pick up after themselves, the generation (not all, I must first say) we are teaching, seem to see us in that light. There are definitely those who will still bound up to you like a little puppy and say hi, there are those who will be eternally grateful for the times you sat down and patiently explained what a subject-verb- order meant, but there are also those who have done well and don't attribute any of that to you and wrinkle their little ingenue noses at you, imagining you to be trash.

What can you say when you meet such a person? Some one that you wrote letters for, some one that you spent time counselling, some one that you thought would be a story that you would regale to bored friends and family a long time after you've stopped teaching, some one whom you thought wouldn't treat you like a hooker? Probably nothing since the moment she sees you, there is the quick dart of the eyes, flick of the hair and about turn just so that she didn't have to say hi and make conversation with someone not worth her while.

Obviously nothing much because at the end of the day, their only worth is a wonderfully ranty blog post on a Sunday afternoon.

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Ondine tossed this thought in at 15:01

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