Mauled on MySpace

http://www.nea.org/home/46469.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=nea_today_express&utm_campaign=20110817EducatorsAttackedOnline&utm_content=RightsWatch

This article makes me a little bit worried about becoming a teacher.  However, this summer, whenever campers called me names or swore at me or anything like that, I just accepted it and said "yep."

One such example was a 58 year old man who told me that I was like a monkey (this was after I had gotten him out of the cafeteria, so he was not happy with me).  I looked at him with a smile and said, "Yep, I'm a monkey, and don't you forget it."  The look on his face made my day, he was so confused and didn't know what to do now that someone did not yell at him for calling them a name.  So, for the rest of the week, he called me monkey as a sign of humor, friendship, and rapport between us (I think that the truest form of rapport is a blurry line between being both friends and a teacher, many people probably are confused and hesitant of allowing this true rapport because they think that being friends means that you can't be a teacher anymore, but I think you can).

This act of accepting and allowing the name calling would definitely be considered offensive to some.  But I feel that if I would have started fighting with him, or arguing with him about calling me a monkey, it would have become a battle of power.  He would want to win, so he would keep doing it, and I would want to win because I am offended, and it would keep going and it would be a big power struggle.  But, I accepted it and then it created a rapport between us that I could get him to do things that nobody else could.

So I think that if a student creates a fake profile of me, I will just look at them and make a comment such as "I like the picture, though you got the part about me having a big nose wrong, because I have a gigantic nose."  It is unconventional to say in the least, but I don't care about winning or being thought of highly by anyone.  What I care about is creating a rapport with my students and teaching them...with them very possibly calling me names and swearing at me.