Alright, it wasn’t like I expected a classful of geniuses, but too many kids with not very much motivation were present. The other classes were great. The kids just read and did their work. But this class had loud kids, kids trying to leave their seats and the room, some for no reason and some leaving to get extra help. It was pretty clear that the school had loaded this class with kids who were perpetually needing assistance – they do this in order not to spread the ed techs too thin – but something else was also responsible for the circus-like atmosphere.

It seemed like some sort of trick of probability had dumped a large number of non-learners into the class, which happens.

The most deliberate dumbass of them all declared that he didn’t like to read and wasn’t going to. He was a tall, good-looking guy, the kind that has things come easy to him, giving him a real sense of privilege. I’m sure he’ll have no trouble convincing some girl to do his homework for him in the future so he won’t actually have to learn anything. Wouldn’t want to disturb those virgin brain cells. Then, whammo, out of high school and…what?

But back to reality. He had been making one heck of a lot of noise, and I finally wrote a short list of the most annoying kids in the room to give to the teacher. He begged me to take his name off the list, and asked if I would remove it if he stayed quiet for the last half of the class. I said that no, it wasn’t going to happen, because no way he’d stay quiet that long. But I agreed just to see what happened.

What happened was that 3 minutes later I saw him ripping up a photo he had taken from a girl seated in front of him. Apparently she had set it down on the table next to his, and he felt this was some sort of a mandate to tear it up. Hello??? Can you spell ‘territoriality’? He can’t, and I’m glad there were no shiny objects moving in his range of vision.

Even female and male cats have different scopes of territoriality. That’s pretty bad, being unable to differentiate between a female’s and a male’s territory. The boy has obviously regressed way before the mammalian state.

So I mentioned this to another teacher, and he told me that this class was part of a group that contained enough kids for two classes. The kids had been divided into two groups – “ready for algebra” and “not algebra material”, or as the other teacher described it, the “shallow end of the gene pool”.

No doubt.