Today I was relieved that bad things were done to Julia and not to me. I realize this does not make me good person, but it did leave me more positive about the coming term than I expected to be.

One of our traditions at the school where I work, once we get our class rosters, is to read off the names of our most troublesome students from the year before so that we my both horrify the teachers who have them and mollify them with a few tricks we learned. We are a bit torn by this as it both prejudices us against the students and creates stress well before stress is required.

Last year at this time one of my colleagues looked at my class roster and started laughing a knowing laugh that revealed a surprising amount of pain and relief. I had been given, based on some past karmic deed apparently, all of his bad students from the year before. Even worse, they were all in one class. He was remembering the suffering and happy that the someone else would be suffering. That said, he was also horrified that all those students had been placed in one class.

Despite any fears of undue prejudice, that class quickly became my worst class. I figured I’d be getting most of them again as I figured the karmic debt was still due thus creating stress before any stress had actually been created (something like that).

Oddly, this year, although I have a few of the students from the bad class, I have none of the worst students. They’ve been split up between two teachers, but there are enough in each class to make each class a problem. The colleague who’d laughed the knowing laugh got all my worst students as karmic punishment for some past deed.

I, of course, felt relief that the students had been spread around to people who weren’t me.

This does not mean that things will be good, it just means that I can be positive until I actually get in front of students.