I'm just about in the middle of a 2-week teaching job on the UPS campus in Tacoma. We've got 50 Japanese & Chinese high school students who are spending the next 10 months as exchange students in various cities in the USA, and it's our job to prepare them for the horrors of the American high school experience.
At the same time, there are huge groups of Mormons, cheerleaders and mathletes on the UPS campus, doing whatever it is those groups do. It's actually been great for our students to see some "typical" American students, and we've forced them to interact a little - on a scavenger hunt the other day, they had to find out who the founder of the Mormon religion was.
What I'm finding most interesting is my own reaction to the various groups, particularly the cheerleaders. You see, I was in the band during high school. We didn't exactly mix with the cheerleaders. It was from my band teacher that I first heard the term "cheerthing." And even now, every time I see a group of them, with their little skirts & their pom poms & their never-ending cheerfulness, I find myself wanting to smack them. Hard.
I'm sure that these girls are perfectly harmless, normal kids. They go to classes, they hang out with their friends, they eat dinner with their families. But then they put on tiny outfits, jump around and shout. And it makes me hostile.
It's probably good that I don't have any nieces.
01 August 2009
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