Here's the latest on the rude student who sassed me last week.

I spoke to him and it went really well. I mean he's just a little kid, really. It turns out I did make a sarcastic remark to him that I had quite forgotten. Not that that excuses his obstreperousness, but I can see how I said something that belittled him in front of his friends, and you simply cannot do that to a middle schooler. Or any student, for that matter. And this is hard for me.

I grew up with sarcasm and the humor of contempt. My parents were a lot older when I was a kid and teenager and they had seen it all. My shenanigans were hardly impressive, and their disinterest let me know that all the time.

I adopted the scornful attitude and sometimes it pops out when I am least paying attention. And that is not a good thing for my students. I don't think I'm as bad as many of my own teachers were, but it's not the kind of teacher I want to be. I want to enjoy humor and laughs with my students, but I do not want to kid them at their expense. I get no joy from that.

I had a high school teacher who derided us pretty regularly just for being teenagers. Maybe it had more to do with where our neighborhood was located. But he was cold and dismissive and superior. And he was in charge of the school newspaper, a coveted activity for quite a few students. What I learned from working on that paper, much more than how to organize a story, was that it was not uncommon for teachers to hold their students in contempt. Maybe that's one of the reasons I had such a miserable time in high school.

But I had a drama teacher in college who also shared this disdainful attitude. He used to complain that teaching at my particular private college was like "being a janitor in a casino, sweeping up after everybody wasted their money." Trouble with him was, he was an excellent drama teacher. But he left before I graduated, and I never did find out what happened to him.

Bob Porter, if you're out there: your classes were the best classes I ever took.

Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Leonard Adams, my fifth grade teacher and middle school science teacher, for teaching me what the word "arduous" meant and for treating me like an actual human; Elizabeth Hoover, my first and second grade teacher who was tough and demanding and made me feel proud of my reading and writing ability; and Laura Perko, my high school Shakespeare teacher who was simply cool.

William Stafford and Anthony Ostroff and Ted Braun and Stephen Dow Beckham at Lewis & Clark College were fascinating teachers to listen to way back in the '70s. Man, that was a long time ago, wasn't it? Terry Faw was a good psych prof, too.

Thanks, teachers. I hope you're enjoying your rest.

The photo top left is of an architecturally attractive building at Lewis & Clark College. The photo top right is roughly the view out my dorm window the year I was a sophomore and wished Don or Ed or Dan would figure out how really very amazing I actually was, and there I was, sleeping in the room right next door.