Chapter 253

• I should explain the kind of teacher I am, and the kind of student Kim was. While I take teaching very seriously, I think the most effective way to teach is to have an amiable relationship with the students, so that they want to pay attention and learn. As such, I often joke around with my students. I sometimes inoffensively make fun of them, and they’ll do it right back. The students seem to enjoy it, and they’ll often drop by my study halls just to chill and talk. This may sound too laid back, but the scores my students get on the state tests last year prove that I’m doing something right.
• Kim was always an easy target to make fun of. Though she came across sounding stupid the way she talked, I had come to know that she was actually pretty smart. She generally knew what was going on in my classes, and was one of few that participated seriously in class on occasion (most my students just joked around when they participated, which I didn’t mind, but I like having a student sound smart every now and then). I had talked to other teachers before this whole thing went down too, and apparently she did well enough in their classes too, so it wasn’t like she was just good in science. Well, maybe good is the wrong word. She was smart enough, but lacked common sense. She put forth minimal effort, rarely doing homework or projects. She got good grades on her tests, and that kept her grades up in the low 80s, some in the high 70s, but that was it. She did practically no work outside of class. I guess I know why now. However, before knowing why, Kim had been an easy target to make fun of in class. I often imitated how she talked, drawing laughs from the rest of the class while only getting a mean smirk from her along with a rolling of the eyes. At the beginning of the year I had actually felt bad about it, but as she continued to not put any effort in doing work outside of class, I lost all my pity for her. Well, until this whole issue arose.
• I should also mention that while many students seemed to like me, Kim did not. I can’t really blame her, given how much I made fun of her, but she was one of few students that really did not seem to like me. A lot of her friends would come up and talk to me in the halls or after school or in my study halls, but she had never talked socially with me before, which made that night at the bar all the more shocking.