The Problem Child is such a little pill, ugh. As soon as class started I was like… oh my god this little girl. She was putting on moisturizer in class. With a mirror and everything. As soon as class started!! And when I asked her plainly what she was doing, she simply answered, “Well, I just woke up.” And if that wasn’t irritating enough, she didn’t even follow the directions for the homework assignment and just kind of turned in bullshit scribbles that obviously didn’t even take her all of five minutes to do. I always strongly suggest a certain quality of work even during the thumbnail phase and she just slacked the fuck off and it was very obvious.

And during the lecture and demo and even during crit it was obvious she wasn’t even paying attention. I pulled up an editorial illustration from Rolling Stone to use as a visual to describe the use of graphic shapes and wabi sabi to tell a story and she kept trying to break the pace of the lesson on purpose, to derail and just spend all class talking about fun things. You know how when a teenager tries to goad you like that, just asking, “Hey Ms. Truffles, what kind of music do you listen to?” So ready to judge and laugh and just kind of needle the teacher. Just without prompting this kid would interrupt the actual lessons to talk about whatever unrelated thing she wanted, like lolita fashion, her hobbies, etcetera. You can imagine she lit the fuck up when she realized that I like toys and dolls and action figures, and she kept trying to get me to talk about dolls instead of the assignment.

Like so:

Problem kid: Ms. Truffles, can we see your dolls?

Me: Maybe some other time when we’re not busy. Okay, so when you’re editing the sort of ‘framing’ of the composition, in the rough draft stage it’s best to-

Problem kid: What scale do you like best? 1/3, ¼, or?

Me: What I like best is when we can pay attention to our work and do a good job.

She huffed at that, FINALLY went and got her materials to work a whole hour and a half into class, and just rolled around not doing a single thing. In fact, she was the only kid who didn’t have a single thing updated to turn in by the end of class, and she pushed her own demo to the very last minute so she had that excuse not to improve her work. It was annoying as fuck.

Like, I just want to be a good teacher. I know the new syllabus for fall is more intensive and requires that you pay attention and actually do your fucking homework on time so we have productive crit and we can actually have lessons instead of just in-class lab time, and she’s busy with zoom school and there’s a plague and civil unrest and natural disasters and political outrage and a recession and everything outside is literally burning to ashes and we had a 4.8 earthquake last night but I still want her to at least pay attention during class and respect me and the other students’ time. This is an expensive program her parents are paying for. And lots of other students who want to pursue art don’t get to have this privilege. And she’s just… Ugh.

Ugh ugh ugh ugh.