As someone who goes into people's homes and does homework help and things like that, I guess I have a certain responsibility to be, you know, a good person. In most cases, this has gone swimmingly.
In my short time teaching, I've been invited to Switzerland twice, I've been offered more food and drink than you can imagine, I've been given suggestions of vacations, I've been congratulated, hugged, kissed (the cheek-things that they do in Europe), and high-fived. I've been laughed at and laughed with. I've generally been pretty OK at this job.
Last week I made a tactical error.
I scared the living crap out of my student.
I help him with his writing assignments, and last week's assignment was to write a short story about basically anything. He was given a few genres and we decided that crime stories would be too hard to write in 250 words, so we kicked around maybe a ghost story or a horror story. We played around with ideas and thought about how to best build tension; he had the great point that oftentimes the difference between horror and scary stories is the suggestion of violence vs. the images of violence. I loved that and totally agree.
As we talked, he started writing some things down and kept getting side-tracked by ghost-story things. It got a little more tense in the room. Then the house phone rang (remember house phones?!) and he just heard jumbled noise on the other end and that started the fear. It was just the two of us in the house, his mom would be back in an hour or so.
We continued.
I jumped on one or two of the things he'd brought up and mentioned that, in my experience, yes, your imagination always makes things scarier than they really are, so suggesting something scary is more powerful than showing something. As we talked more, he flat-out said "OK, I'm getting scared here." and I laughed and pointed out that he'd be fine, these are just stories, etc.
The phone rang again.
He picked it up, listened for a moment, and handed it to me. Garbled voices from the other end.
This was too good to be true.
It got bad enough that I had to walk him through the house, poking into every room, making sure no one was there except us. He tried calling his mom to confirm what time she'd be home...and she didn't answer. So he tried calling his dad to confirm what time he'd be home...and he didn't answer. It was magical.
Ultimately, he bailed on the assignment, which I felt badly about but it was also a practice-writing thing and not a real assignment for a grade. He suggested that I watch the news the next day to see if a killer had made his/her way through the neighborhood and feasted on a terrified 14 year old boy, but I totally didn't watch so things could get really awkward when I show up for the next lesson.
I'm an adult!
In my short time teaching, I've been invited to Switzerland twice, I've been offered more food and drink than you can imagine, I've been given suggestions of vacations, I've been congratulated, hugged, kissed (the cheek-things that they do in Europe), and high-fived. I've been laughed at and laughed with. I've generally been pretty OK at this job.
Last week I made a tactical error.
I scared the living crap out of my student.
I help him with his writing assignments, and last week's assignment was to write a short story about basically anything. He was given a few genres and we decided that crime stories would be too hard to write in 250 words, so we kicked around maybe a ghost story or a horror story. We played around with ideas and thought about how to best build tension; he had the great point that oftentimes the difference between horror and scary stories is the suggestion of violence vs. the images of violence. I loved that and totally agree.
As we talked, he started writing some things down and kept getting side-tracked by ghost-story things. It got a little more tense in the room. Then the house phone rang (remember house phones?!) and he just heard jumbled noise on the other end and that started the fear. It was just the two of us in the house, his mom would be back in an hour or so.
We continued.
I jumped on one or two of the things he'd brought up and mentioned that, in my experience, yes, your imagination always makes things scarier than they really are, so suggesting something scary is more powerful than showing something. As we talked more, he flat-out said "OK, I'm getting scared here." and I laughed and pointed out that he'd be fine, these are just stories, etc.
The phone rang again.
He picked it up, listened for a moment, and handed it to me. Garbled voices from the other end.
This was too good to be true.
It got bad enough that I had to walk him through the house, poking into every room, making sure no one was there except us. He tried calling his mom to confirm what time she'd be home...and she didn't answer. So he tried calling his dad to confirm what time he'd be home...and he didn't answer. It was magical.
Ultimately, he bailed on the assignment, which I felt badly about but it was also a practice-writing thing and not a real assignment for a grade. He suggested that I watch the news the next day to see if a killer had made his/her way through the neighborhood and feasted on a terrified 14 year old boy, but I totally didn't watch so things could get really awkward when I show up for the next lesson.
I'm an adult!
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