I'm just what's-her-name in the back row

I used to be a teacher.  When we first moved here, I taught spreadsheets and business software at the local community college (the same one where I hope to be teaching freshman writing in a year or two).  Usually my classes had 12-15 students, but occasionally, for reasons known only to the registration gods, a class would be full to overflowing.  The computer labs had 24 computers in them if they were all working--which was rare--so when you had 25-26 students, it was a problem.

Not just because of the lack of computer space.  Lab time turned into a circus of me trying to be everywhere at once.  In some classes, a spontaneous spirit of camaraderie would develop, and the students would help each other.  But one time I had the class from hell, and there were 25 of them, and they were divided up into snipey little pockets of disgruntled, critical students.

After the first test, one of the students who always sat at the back and never said anything came up to gripe about his grade (which, if I remember right, was a C or so, not failing).  I was friendly, but firm.  The test was fair; most students had done well on it.  At some point in the conversation, he said to me, "You've had it in for me since the first day of class," at which my eyebrows must have raised practically to my hairline in surprise, because he immediately started backpedaling.

I could barely keep track of what was going on in the classroom, let alone plan to systematically undermine a particular student.  I didn't dislike the kid, and I knew for sure that I wanted him to do well, in the generalized way I wanted all my students to do well. To be entirely honest, I wasn't even exactly sure what his last name was, he was just one of that group of 3-4 students at the back who rarely participated.

Which says terrible things about me as a teacher, I know.  But it was a college-level class, dang it.

Anyway.  It's something I've thought of often when I've had a paranoid tendency to think that someone I don't know well doesn't like me or has deliberately snubbed or ignored me.  Chances are slim.  It's almost never about me.  It was a great object lesson.

The rest of this was a long, whiny complaint about a situation I've been in where I felt like that kid in the back row of the class.  But I'm deleting the rest of it and ending here, because it's not worth putting the energy into that particular kind of negative thinking.  Ha, which reminds me of a post I've been meaning to write about negative thinking.  Maybe I will completely switch gears and go for that, because it's not long enough to make into its own post.

So here's the deal. We all know that negative thinking is bad, that we don't like to be around people who are negative, who are always looking for the dark cloud around the silver lining.  Got that.  But then there's also the completely true fact that if you ignore negative stuff, you'll end up neurotic with an ulcer.  I'm starting to think that maybe there's two kinds of negativity-- one that's just honesty, acknowledging the darker side of our experience, and another that's a twisted form of that, where you're always raining on other people's parade, always criticizing and carping and looking for other people's faults.  That first kind of negative thinking isn't bad; it's necessary.  The second kind is the kind I want to avoid (and that's why I deleted the whiny part of this post).

Huh.  and that makes me wonder if there's two kinds of positive thinking, too.  One that's based on a genuine love of life--all of it, good, bad, positive, negative-- and warm acceptance of other people exactly as they are; and another that's based on ignoring anything you don't want to see.  The first kind is something I aspire to (to which I aspire), the second kind gives me the complete and utter creeps because it was such an unhealthy thing for me in my early life.

Do with this disjointed mess what you will.