I have a colleague who inevitably says every morning as she walks down the eighth-grade hallway by my door, “Today’s going to be a great day!” Sometimes she’s sarcastic, but most of the time, she’s very much in earnest. It’s an easy enough trick, I suppose, this power of positive thinking, but it then throws you for a loop when the same lady, after saying “Today’s going to be a great day” passes by you and says, “Today is going to suck.”

One of the many challenges with teaching is that we enter a room in which we have the whole range of thoughts from “Today is going to be a great day!” to “Today is going to suck.” Those conflicting expectations result in conflicting behaviors, which results in a conflicted teacher. When is a kid being a pain in the butt just because he feels like being a pain in the butt — i.e., the natural function of being an eighth-grader — and when is it the function of something bigger, something direr? The response to those two different motivations is shaded differently.