Lately, in anticipation of summer beginning shortly, I’ve been trying to change my diet and get a bit more exercise. Up until recently, I’d fully well have acknowledged that my diet has been absolutely awful for quite a while now, but lately I’ve been actually paying a lot of attention to it and — prepare to be shocked — actually going to the gym for the first time in about 8 years. I’ve gone running seven of the last ten days, for instance, and am feeling pretty good about it.
Anyway, more on that later, perhaps, but the real point here, and one I’ve already alluded to on here already recently — when I don’t drink and get a decent amount of sleep, I’m way more jazzed about getting up early and getting a jump on my day. How annoying, then, to find myself up, fed, showered, dressed, out the door and on the train platform by a few minutes after 9:00… Only to wait while — I swear to God — five packed trains roll by and I have to wait about a half an hour to finally make it on to one.
In and of itself this was only mildly annoying, I suppose, given that it’s a gorgeous day outside, I had a paper to read, I wasn’t late to work, and I wasn’t exactly rushing in to get anything in particular done. The real fun started, though, when I finally made it on to the sixth train to pass by only to find that it was literally — not figuratively — packed with what I’d guess were elementary school aged kids.
Were kids that age always so fucking annoying? Seriously. There were probably 30 of the little ankle-biters huddled in two groups, half of them singing (quite loudly) retarded and mildly offensive “me Chinese, me play joke, me go peepee in your Coke”-styled schoolyard anthems. At first I assumed, as there are both a high school and a big subway transfer station about three blocks from where I get on the train, that most of these kids would get off there. But I paid a bit more attention for a minute, and while I’m pretty bad about guessing kids’ ages, I realized that these kids were (1) a bit too large a group and (2) a bit too young to be on a trip by themselves. Conclusion? They were on a field trip.
Now, I remember when I was a kid and we had field trips, we generally had buses to take us wherever we were going. I’ll totally grant NY an exception in terms of finding that workable, but either way… What fucking teacher lets these kids run completely amok on public transportation on their way to some school-sponsored event? I’m not trying to sound like a total douche because I realize that kids are supposed to goof off and act like kids a good part of the time, but I don’t think it’s so unrealistic to expect a teacher, when carting a few dozen of them onto a crowded commuter train, to enforce some sort of crowd control. I mean, ten and eleven year old kids should be able to shut the fuck up for twenty minutes, I think. I got so annoyed that after six stops I jumped off the train and ran one car down for the rest of the ride to work.
“but I don’t think it’s so unrealistic to expect a teacher, when carting a few dozen of them onto a crowded commuter train, to enforce some sort of crowd control.”
You have obviously never been a teacher. Seriously, I would love to see you try.
No, I’ve certainly never been a “teacher” in any traditional sense, and don’t think I’d want to be. I did volunteer when in grad school to help out with an after school program at a local high school talking to 9th grade (10th?) kids about issues relating to pre-college and grad school admissions, and was incredulous at how ill-behaved some of them (a lot of them) were. Like, I had to stop talking and ask certain ones to be quiet because — this being a program that was voluntary on the kids’ part as well — presumably some were there because they wanted to be (whereas, sure, some were probably there because their parents made them do it). I think I got a “you’re not the teacher” once, and I responded with something to the effect of, “No, I’m not, but you’re all here until I’m done talking. Get it?”
And sure, kids can be raucous, but seriously… When I was a kid — there, I finally said, “when I was a kid…” — I remember the *bus driver* who took us to school would pull over if we were too loud on the *bus*. These kids’ *teacher* literally sat there on the train while they were chanting moderately offensive and super-annoying playground memes on a crowded public train en route to a class trip and said not a word.
I feel bad for the kids in the class who aren’t as dumb as many of them are probably on the track to becoming.