Being Mr. Fry

I exist in a strange world in my school. In the first few weeks of hustle and bustle and trying to figure out the system I rarely had a moment to stop and consider my place in GS Eidelstedt, especially considering that I was still figuring out just what that place was. But now that I've dug pretty deep into the system there's more opportunity to reflect on how my particular little gear fits into the huge, complex machine that is this school.

Even nowadays, four months into this experience, I don't quite know what I am--what my primary function is if you will. I'm certainly not a teacher, which, all things considered, is a bit ironic. One of the many reasons I applied to the Fulbright program is that I wanted to get a perspective on what being a teacher is actually like. It's a career I'm interested in, so I wanted to give it a test run before committing myself to it. "Assistant teacher," however, is very far away from the real thing. Sure I do lessons and make up worksheets and have authority in a classroom, but the teaching part of being a teacher is only a part of the whole package. Sonja, one of the seventh grade teachers I work with, put it to me one day in a very short, off-hand remark that actually ended up being very much to the point. After I had finished doing a lesson in her class and let her take over to assign the homework, she told me, "Well, you're the good cop. Now I get to take over and be the bad cop."

This "good cop" relationship I have with the students is about the closest thing I can come up with to describe the persona I use around them. Older students come up and high five me or shake my hand in the hallway when I walk by; groups of younger students wave me over to come and chat with them in the courtyard during breaks; fifth and sixth graders swarm me when I walk all the way down to their playground and beg me to beatbox for them. I would have rarely done anything like that with a teacher when I was in high school, but around here it's the norm. It all makes the title of "Mr. Fry" seem a little strange sometimes, like I'm not quite in a position where people should be calling me mister just yet. It has made the experience much more enjoyable than if I was actually in the position of the "bad cop," it's actually a lot of fun being so close with the students, but sometimes it can be a little strange and difficult to tread the line between friend and teacher.

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In other news: been miserably sick for the past week now. I went the whole winter break without a problem, and then a couple days after New Years I caught a pretty bad cold, which laid me out for all of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I was fine on Thursday, overestimated things and stayed out late, and now we're back to square one. Good news is that I've finished the reimagined Battlestar Galactica in it's entirety after having started it and stopped junior year (really, really good TV, I highly recommend it). Bad news is that spending all day in bed drinking tea is really effing boring. So here's hoping that things get better.