I surprised a teacher by telling him how good his class was. I’ll almost certainly regret that, but it is part of a plan.

In the past, when I’ve had bad classes I’ve done my best to report both good news and bad news. I do this because I recognize that having someone drag their problems into your work day can be a real pain as it used to happen to me more times than it should have. (More on that in another post.) It’s very easy to abuse that outlet and, over time, the homeroom teachers cringe as soon as one of us walks in the classroom.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that one of the times I brought good news, the teacher was happy I thought he might cry tears of joy. Mind you, his class was never good again, but I made his day at least once, and that good news helped me deliver bad news.

What’s unusual this year is that the homeroom teacher was the one who delivered the bad news. He told me the class were worse than my bad class last year as he visibly shuddered at the thought of teaching them.

However, they seem to be made up of mostly students from one of my better classes, albeit with a few unknown unknowns thrown in.  However, today they were pretty good and everyone did the writing and speaking (although i suspect one student cheated on the final speaking project). This is unusual enough for the first class after school trips that felt I should deliver this news to the homeroom teacher. At first he seemed to think I was lying, then he acted genuinely pleased that I’d brought good news.

Mind you, June is coming along with hot weather that is often accompanied by rainy season (note: it appears that it may actually rain during rainy season rather than before it in the season in which it rains.) When June arrives temperaments change. If nothing happens before summer, it almost always happens after.

Until then, I’ll keep saying nice things about the class every time they deserve it. Until it’s time to not be nice.