When I was a little girl there was this song I used to sing whenever I was REALLY feeling worthless, which honestly was a lot of the time. It went like this:
(please feel free to sing along if you know this one)
Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
I'm gonna go out and eat worms
Fat ones, skinny ones
Little in-betwinny ones
I’m gonna go out and eat worms
I don’t know where I learned it, or who taught it to me, it was just always there in my brain waiting to be sung. It made a great musical accompaniment to a pity party.
There are many versions of this song (yes I searched it on the internet) but they all start the same and all have the consumption of innocent nightcrawlers as the desired course of action to take when the world hates you.
I’ll return to this theme in a moment - but first a tangent that will eventually tie in.
In my class whenever I make a sentence for the students to translate I can’t do a normal sentence like: Bobby reads a book. or Betty eats potatoes. That’s boring. Who wants to translate that? So I always try to come up with something either interesting, currently applicable to the kids, funny, sarcastic, or off the wall. Preferably all of the above. It lets me give them harder, more challenging sentences that they don’t complain about. It makes for some more interesting vocabulary skills and keeps most students from snoring in class which is really rather disruptive to those students who are already asleep. So instead my sentences would be something like: Bobby tries to kiss ugly girls but they run too fast. or Betty eats worms with onions and ketchup.
In fact eating worms tends to be a re-occurring theme in my classes. I never really thought much about it or wondered why until today when I had a little epiphany.
I had just come back from another frustrating trip to the main office, I was in tears and feeling worthless and unappreciated and as I walked into my classroom I saw a sample sentence on the board and the worm song popped into my head and I suddenly saw the connection.
So much of my brand of humor and sarcasm and strange and crazy things I do in my classroom can be traced to my profound sense of worthlessness and the overcompensation and coping mechanisms developed over so many years of self loathing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching the strange way I do - It would be boring otherwise. It is just reassuring to know that something worthwhile comes out of the pain. Because somedays it just hurts so much to be alive.
2 comments:
Oh dear! You make me sad and make me laugh at the same time. Can I steal your line about snoring students disrupting the ones already asleep? That's hilarious. I worry too if the snoring students in my class are bothering the ones trying to send complex text messages.
I hope you sometimes realize (amid all the sad stuff and the wormy stuff) that you are much loved. I think you're funny and brave and kind and smart. Your students are so lucky that they get to see you more than your family. How is that fair?
I too am a worm eater. It's so, so hard to break habits like that no matter how much people tell you they love you.
I learned it as "I think I'll go eat worms." So as the song applies to me, I don't get any further than THINKING about it. At least in your version you are actually going to DO it.
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