Teacher Follies

An amusing/embarrassing thing happened to me today.

Because I write so much, I am very careful to keep paper that I've only used one side of to use as scratch paper. I have a big stack of this on my desk, and when students come to see me, I usually write with/for them on some of this paper, and then if they want, I let them take the paper with them. I figure the graduate math on the other side won't hurt them any (though it hurts me plenty, I can tell you).

Anyway, sometimes when I am working on problems, I write notes to myself in the margins. Often the notes say something like, "I suck at this type of problem :(" or "I will never get this!!!!" I try not to give papers like that to students, but I don't try very hard.

Yesterday, a guy came to my office hours and I sent him away with three sheets of my scratch paper. Today before class, he was showing it to another student, and I overheard this conversation:

Other student: Huh. It says "I am a bad ass" on this side. Did you [to the first student] write this?
First student: No, I think she wrote that. This is her work for some other stuff.

So I wandered over and sure enough, I had written "I am a bad ass" in the margin of my work. We had a good laugh over it.

It's kind of embarrassing, but I'm glad it was positive self-talk for once, and not the negative kind. One of my friends in the program pointed out that it was good that I had at least not written that I was a BAMF, which is also something I might write (either as an abbreviation or written out).

So anyway, there's that.