I live in a neighbourhood where many of my students live. A few know which house is mine; most don’t. I haven’t had any trouble at all (not even at Hallowe’en! When teachers’ houses are always egged/tp’d! It’s never happened) since moving here. Still though, I don’t tell them which one’s my house. A couple know because they’ve seen me getting into my car or whatever, but I don’t point out where I live to them.
This morning, after breakfast (a BLT – yeah, I know, I should eat a BLT because my body is such a natural fat burner – yeah right), I took the dogs for a walk. And at about Mile 1.5, I saw one of my students standing in front of her house. She called out to me and waved. I waved back and kept on trucking – no time to stop and talk. And at Mile 2, I noticed that there was someone behind us. Yeah. My student. She was kind of following, and had a couple of other kids with her – ones I don’t know so they must be younger and at the elementary school. I heard her say “That’s my teacher! I want to know where she lives!” to one of her companions, but whenever I’d turn around to look at her, she’d pretend she was looking at a tree or something. Super spy sleuthing skillz, for sure.
It’s not that I don’t like my students, or even that I think that they would do anything terrible if they did know exactly where I lived. It’s just that I want to be able to do things like, oh, be in my backyard this spring, without all of them hanging around and watching me while I work on the garden. They’re fascinated by their teachers’ lives outside of school. It’s like zoo times or something. They’ll stand around and stare for two hours at me just pulling weeds.
Anyway, eventually I lost her (I think one of her friends got tired of walking, plus it was starting to rain), and the dogs and I came home. I’m sure on Monday she’ll say something like “I almost found out where you live!” and I’ll just smile and nod. And hope that she loses interest soon enough.
How funny that she was following you!
When I was in grade school, I knew where at least two of my teachers lived. My 4th grade teacher lived on the same street as the swimming pool we went to in the summer. We used to see her in her yard sometimes when we walked by, and we’d wave. And my 7th grade teacher lived in a house on the other side of the big field in the back of our school! It was a small parochial school, though.
That’s cute – that they want to know where you live. I was never that interested in where my teachers lived or what they did outside of school but, then again, I used to suffer from a deplorable lack of curiosity in my youth.
SAY DO WHAT NOW ?!? Ya’ll got me straight trippin’!