post the thirty-fifth

With a few days yet until I return to school and everyone else in my family gone all day at school or work, I've been forced to turn to alternate means of passing the time. One can only spend so much time on the Internet or solving sudoku or reading books. Eventually you need to get out and do something.

As I'm studying to be a teacher someday and my mom is currently a teacher, she set up an appointment for me to pop in on one of my old teachers and observe him teaching for a day. It was a lot of fun; I learned a lot about how to solve different classroom management situations and how to present oneself and the material to a class. However, I think the most interesting part of my venture back to high school was simply being around high school students again. Things didn't seem quite so stupid to me when I was one of them.

One of the classes I sat in on was a speech class for freshmen. I was treated to a conversation between two young women, probably about fourteen years of age, about their dating woes and being grounded before class started. Apparently one of them wasn't allowed by her parents to seriously date boys until she was sixteen and had been grounded from "everything" for having violated that rule. To hear her tell it, her parents forbade her from speaking on the phone (which had been locked in her mother's closet), listening to music, watching television, and was only permitted to do homework at home. "If I finish it all, they make more," she complained.

However, despite the freakish brutality inflicted on her by her parents, her man was sticking with her. It didn't matter to him that they couldn't date until she was sixteen. He would never forget her. "I'll even wait for you until you're eighteen," he reportedly said. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I think she took it as a testament of his devotion. Not even grounding can come between them. Truly a touching story.

I was pleased to see that she was told off during class for sitting in someone else's seat and talking to the girl she had been conversing with before class. Ah, high school. Heady days, they were.