Walking into a classroom where teachers are huddled around whispering is something I’ve experienced often during my time here at WS.
Over the years, I’ve also come to realize that some departments let loose a little more than others. Not to say it isn’t occasionally entertaining, but sometimes it goes overboard.
Lately, it seems to me that teachers seem to have more of a lax demeanor when it comes to gossip. For example, I walked into the teacher trailer in Sparta to deliver newspapers where the other editors and I found a few teachers gathered around the table eating their lunches. All was tame and mild until a teacher said one thing that spiraled into a spit fire of conversation paralleled with that of middle school gossip, perhaps only heightened with elevated diction.
From past teacher scandals to current student disappointments – whatever it was, it was said. No filter, even after greeting us and sharing a few friendly words. It was as if we were not in the room.
After leaving, my fellow editors and I just stared at each other in awe both because of the things we had heard, but mostly because of how unfiltered these role models of ours were being. There was a level of honest disappointment that I felt once I really started to take in those few minutes we had spent spectating the teachers. Everything about the setting was so average: average Blue Day, average lunch, and average weather – nothing out of the ordinary was occurring to foster these conversations.
That’s precisely what was disappointing. If that was average, I am beginning to think that this type of lax gossip and loose trash talking occurs more often than not within the walls (and trailer park) of WS.
If the new average, normal conversation is spilling dirt about a teacher or two, and naming off students who are “incompetent in the class” or “failing miserably” then there is a serious issue with the morale of teachers here. What happened to talking about the weather?
I understand that students do this too. I’d know, I’ve been surrounded by gossip and trash talk since entering the infamous halls of Irving Middle School, but that’s what qualifies me to say that it does no good for anybody. Not the one gossiping, or the poor person being gossiped about.
As my incredibly wise mother always used to say, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it at all.”
I say all this not with the intention to stoop to the conversation level those teachers did in that trailer, but instead to release a friendly public service announcement: Teachers, we hear you. Your gossip, your trash talking of coworkers and students alike – you’re not slick.