touchmonkey

I’m a teacher in a public high school. Which I guess means I’m part of the problem with America’s education system. But I like kids and hopefully from time to time I do some good for them. But sometimes I just want to scream. Or bludgeon. Bludgeoning’s good. But I never want to bludgeon any kids. Well, hardly ever, anyway. It’s the adults I’d like to give some Louisville Slugger attention.

Take this lady as an example. Not lady in the “Ladies and Gentlemen” sense… more like lady in the “Hey lady don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out” kind of way. This particularly fine example of what happens when gene pools get too shallow is the parent of one of my students. Not a very good student. Not a very good kid. Long story short, kid gets in trouble at school and we have to have a parent-teacher conference about it.

Mom comes in with both barrels firing, so to speak. Sort of in mother-bear mode, which is understandable, if misguided. As the conference wears on, it becomes quite clear we’re not going to see eye to eye about… well… anything. Then she lays this doozey on me: “you just don’t understand how things work in America because you’re foreign.”

I guess it’s not readily apparent why this is such an absurd statement since I write this cloaked in the anonymity of the internet. Suffice it to say that my mother’s side of the family has been in America since colonial days and my father’s side came over three generations ago. The fact that my last name contains more than one syllable apparently marked me as a foreigner for her.

Now, at this point I was furious. You know how sometimes you’ll wake up two days later with the perfect comeback but of course it’s too late? That didn’t happen. I had the perfect retort spring to mind and man oh man, it would have been so sweet to lay into this piece of Jerry Springer show refuse. But I chose professionalism and merely stood up, thanked the lady for her time, and declared the meeting over. Smug in her perceived victory, Loud Ignorant Mom strutted from the room as if she had just won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

I guess that’s why they pay us the big money.

I’ve spent the past few years sneering at all the pathetic bloggers in the world. What a bunch of boring navel-gazers. Now I’ve finally broken down and become one of them. But I promise not to do any belly-button staring. At least not at my own.

One of the things I’m most excited about with touchmonkey is the opportunity it provides me to cover topics I would hesitate to broach if I were writing under my actual name. I know conventional wisdom holds that internet anonymity is often misused as a license for anti social behavior, but I’d like to think that anything anti-social I have to say here is strictly called for - rather than the typical anonymous internet tough guy rantings that pollute message boards, list serves, and… blogs.

So — what will touchmonkey cover? Anything and everything that seems worth writing about. At the very least, it will be a good writing exercise. At best? Somebody might learn something.