I’m the nerd who does my boyfriend’s homework now. He’s an English major, so if he doesn’t understand how to find meaning in an abstract poem, or if he needs help creating a lesson plan, he sends them to me. I then stay up late with his assignments, tucking myself into bed after sending his homework off as an attachment, also safely tucked, in an email to my boyfriend. What I’m saying is that his homework and I go to bed together more consistently than my boyfriend and I go to bed together.
My boyfriend pushed off going back to school until after I graduated from college, and at first I thought this was a money issue. No, it was an I-need-to-make-sure-Jordy-has-time-to-do-my-homework issue. Sometimes I think I use him for his car and he uses me for my brain. Neither of us use each other for our bodies. Trust me.
As I sat there last night, creating my boyfriend’s first lesson plan for him, I realized I never considered becoming a teacher. Really, I didn’t, which people find odd because most little girls who enjoyed school as much as me have considered becoming a teacher (for the record, I did not enjoy school at all. I just liked getting made fun of by my fellow students better than getting yelled at by my siblings. Life is a real bitch for a badass middle schooler.)
The whole “teacher” thing stopped being appealing to me when me and my older sister used to play school with our American Girl dolls (yes, we were spoiled, we had American Girl dolls, plural.) My sister, let’s call her Satana, was always the teacher. I could be the teaching assistant if Satana felt like being nice that day, but mostly I was the annoying mom who wanted to be involved in her children’s schoolwork. The mom who insists on sitting in on class. The mom Professor Satana hated—so why did she play with me?
Because my children got F’s. Straight F’s. According to my sister, the teacher, Satana, her dolls were all A++ geniuses while mine couldn’t figure out simple math, or how to construct a complete sentence. My dolls made her dolls feel VERY good about themselves. Written on my dolls’ papers were words like dismal or disappointing or lack of originality. Satana’s dolls got Perfect! and Good work! So much better than those loser dolls on the reject side of the classroom, with the over-involved mom!
Her dolls were just in grade school, but they spent their free time working on Harvard and Yale applications and going to Mensa meetings. My dolls created mud pies in the yard. And then ate them. My dolls were idiots, apparently. I did not raise these dolls well.
And now my sister is a teacher in Bulgaria (I know, right?), close to the boyfriend he met in Romania. His name is Martin, and that’s a whole other story. Who goes to Romania and meets a Martin? Who works at a call center for Microsoft? I could’ve introduced her to seven Martins here in Peoria! But again, that’s a whole other story for a different post. This post was about Satana killing any desire I would’ve had to become a teacher. And me being a nerd who does my boyfriend’s homework.
*Note, if you had a similar situation with your older sister, or if you liked the blog, or had any feeling really, please comment!
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