Ya gotta love ‘em…

In February, when Semester 2 began, I set the visit counter on my Teacher’s website to zero. I put the counter in for curiosity’s sake to see if students would actually check for updated notes and information. Things were going well. Everything was calm and the numbers were increasing in a relatively smooth manner as expected. Nothing out of the ordinary…

THEN, one day I came home, logged on, and was blown away by the sudden increase in number from 500 to 15,000. At first I felt all happy and excited and called V to tell him about my sudden website popularity among 'young learners.' I happily thought to myself that wow, these kids are actually checking the site to see my cool notes for extra reading! V, who likes to burst my happiness, pointed out that these students obviously have no life if they even check my site once on their weekend. However, it wasn’t a love for reading, nor was it having 'no life' that was so much the case (although some could still argue the latter) ...

Next day I walk into the room with an eager smile on my face – ready to teach my class of 3U "super-achievers" with all the energy in the world, and then:

Student X: Ms. C-, I spent 2 hours on the weekend clicking on your site!

Me: Huh?

Student X: Ya! I kept clicking and clicking to see the number go up, student-Y and I were having a competition to see who could raise it more!

Me: Oh... *crestfallen*

Student Y: That’s right! And I clicked it much more than X did!

Student X: No way! I –



They then proceed to argue for the next ten minutes over who clicked my site more. At least I got an answer for the sudden jump in numbers.

On Monday that number tripled.

I decided to have a private meeting with X and Y. Hey, I didn’t want people (and God forbid, other teachers) thinking that I had clicked on the site so many times myself to try to make my site look popular! The highest visitor number a teacher in my school has is 3,000 (my students informed me of this and yes, and I looked it up to confirm). So I told them that I’d much rather appreciate if they read the information I post on the site rather than randomly click to it for fun. They then became all serious and earnestly began explaining to me that if they got the number high enough, maybe the admin at the school would see how much the students liked me and would take me on as a permanent teacher. In other words, they were trying to help me. When they explained that to me, I swear, my eyes just welled up with tears and I had to excuse myself and leave the room because I felt myself getting all emotional. Really? That had been their intent? I thought they were just having stupid useless fun. I dried my eyes, went back to class and began teaching but couldn’t get that out of my head.

With a heavy heart, today I began applying for positions at other schools.

At this moment, the number on my classroom visit counter now stands at 45, 929.

How can I ever leave these kids?