Or, Why teenage boys are just about the loveliest thing on the planet.

It maybe isn’t smart for a teacher to publicly announce just how much she loves teenage boys and thinks that they are just the cutest things ever to exist… But I’m going to stick two fingers up to a society that immediately assumes there’s something seedy about saying it, and say it anyway: Teenage boys are the cutest things ever to exist.

For those of you girls out there, who remember teenage boys as a work of sheer evil; callous, cruel, smelly who laugh at you and tell all their friends that you can’t kiss, I ask you to think again. And here’s a story or two from today to help.
This morning, while working studiously on the problem of evil in the world, my class were distracted by a piece of paper that had fallen to the floor. Reading it, one of the class found that it was a carefully written poem about another of the students in the class, a lovely girl who was mortified to read it, finding within the sort of thing only a dangerous stalker – or a totally smitten teenager – might say. Your smile lights up the day. You are not like the others. I want to be near you. Recognising that it could only have been written by someone in the room, I asked them all to get back to what they were doing, and put the poem away in my drawer. At the end of the lesson, one of the boys hung back. He looked a little sheepish. I asked him “Do you want your poem back?”.
“I don’t know what to do, Miss”, he said “Did it fall out of my bag? How did it get there? Do you think they knew that I wrote it?”. I tried to comfort him, tell him that worse things happened to me as a teenager.”My poetry days are over, Miss” he said.
“No, no” I said “Just… maybe… don’t write the girl’s name, in full, as a title to the poem”.
“It’s not even like I like her much, I just… Why do I always do this?” he lamented.
Ah, don’t you miss being 17?

And then, later, when a student from yesterday turned up to a detention I had given him (for not doing any work and telling me when I told him off “It’s not even a lesson I care about!”) I got another little insight into the lives of these little men. Writing an essay on why he was in detention, he instead wrote me an apology “I’m sorry I was rude to you, I’m having a really hard time at the moment. I have a lot on my mind like coursework and homework and well my girlfriend left me and it’s all be a bit weird. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you and I promise to try harder”.

I let him go early. I’m a stickler for romantics.