I wish I could kill with my mind

But I guess it is probably best if I continue to be unable to do so.

What you want context? The world isn't enough? Fine I got some context.

The new term started for coding classes, so I have a pile of new schools and classes to teach, today I had my first class at a new school and was chatting with the students, this class was 3rd-5th grade and skewed towards the older side, which I like because I can have real conversations with that age group and make jokes and stuff. Anyway it came up that I didn't smoke, this was pretty surprising to a few of the students and one told me that "Don't start, because parents will always promise they will quit smoking, or d-drinking and then they don't".

She said this in a very matter of fact manner, just another comment in the tide of conversation.

Later on I mentioned to the class that I would be emailing their parents information about what we had been working on, and some links to stuff so they could work at home too, the same girl spoke up and said "Could you say guardians? I don't live with my mom." a couple other kids agreed with the idea so I said sure, she told me a story about how one of her teachers would not do that and instead say things like: "Your parents(turns to look at this girl specifically) or guardian."

That was a lot to get casually dropped on me during an hour long class I tell ya.

Last term at another school I had a student who had several down days and one day told me they were leaving early because they were getting bullied and they were feeling sad, their parent was coming to pick them up and they were safe so it wasn't a big deal, we sat together for a couple minutes before I took the rest of the class to the computer lab to start our afternoon. Notice my use of gender neutral pronouns in the above paragraph? Take a wild guess why this kid was being bullied. They informed me a week or so later, when we were setting the student Scratch accounts up, that they didn't feel like either gender and didn't want to pick either one from the menu, fortunately we discovered a field(poorly labeled) for you to write your own in if you didn't want to check male or female so that was nice. When walking from the cafeteria where we meet up to the classroom they would once in a while put their hand on my elbow, not holding tight, just... there.

Another kid in my class was a huge dick to everyone around him, He was large for a 2nd grader and slightly overweight so he could physically dominate people, and did when he thought he could get away with it, I gathered that he was similar during regular school hours as well, he also spent a great deal of time not following directions in class. After a couple of weeks I realized that he couldn't read even a little bit, numbers were hard too. Now Oregon educational standards(according to Zena) don't mandate literacy at 2nd grade so I imagine no one was trying too hard to push this discipline issue to read properly, but if I had to guess I would say he probably has some form of dyslexia or possibly even just really needs glasses. Whatever the reason there was nothing actually wrong with his brain, when we had to work very closely with him on some of the tasks we set up, and when we got him to understand the lesson, and he actually figured out problems using that knowledge, his attitude would disappear and for a minute he would be a happy little kid showing off a thing he figured out. his attitude, I am pretty sure, was just a deflection, a preemptive mechanism to keep people from calling him stupid.

I want to destroy the people responsible for all this. You all have seen it before, those of you who are full time teachers have seen much worse I know, but there should be no world where that stuff happens to kids, let alone everything else.

I talk a lot about not wanting to be rewarded for doing the bare minimum, and this shit is what I mean, the little gender non-conforming kid who decided I was trustworthy shouldn't make that decision based on a couple hours of kindness from a stranger, the girl who told me those stories shouldn't have to tell them to someone she just met in hopes of finding someone who listens, I shouldn't be the one getting the credit for being nice to kids. It should be expected and required of every single fucking one of us and it isn't, it isn't at all.

So I wish I could kill with my mind. But it's probably for the best I can't.