Young Love

There's this one student in my class who has this weird rather peculiar habit of standing near  our door whenever she's done with works and all. Yes it's a 15-year-old girl.

She's been doing this since February this year. Later I found out from her that her boyfriend is in the next classroom. You see, our classroom's door is partially glass (on top). 

To be honest, I thought she was only joking. You know how kids love to throw pranks at us adults.

But this one, the whole class verified her confession. She has a boyfriend who is a year younger than her.

One more thing. Every week she'd ask me this question: 

"Teacher, do you think my Adam (not his real name) is handsome?" I just smiled at her first. Not knowing what to say. So I'd reply (again and again), "He's OK lah. Cute too."

And she seems not so happy with how I reply every now and then. So in the end, I'd give in and say "OK, he's handsome".

The rest of her friends told me that once a month Adam would bake cookies for her. He even walks with her after class to a fitness centre where her mom waits for her.

I did ask her "Does your mom know that you and Adam are dating?" She said YES.

Wow! Lucky girl, I said to myself.

When I had my first boyfriend 17 years ago, I had to date discreetly. My mother wouldn't allow me to have a boyfriend at such young age. But I did have one, met him at a church camp. I didn't do the first move, of course. We dated for 7 months until one day my mother discovered about us. So she gave me two choices; break up with him or she'd drag us both to the altar. The 15-year-old me freaked out and I broke up with him. Poor lad. My mother's the ultimate villain here, don't you think?

If you ask me, what happened to my first boyfriend later on? Now he is a happily married man with two young boys. Good for him.

Recently, the head teacher (sort of, since he does all the syllabus back at my workplace) came up with a topic on the negative sides of getting involved in puppy love relationship for the students to work on; they were assigned to write a report based on that topic. I found the points given on that sheet were a bit odd. Basically, the points seemed biased. When I handed out the sheets to my students, our Juliet (not her real name) kept quiet throughout the session. The moment I announced the topic to the class, it wiped the smile off her face. I felt guilty in a way. But I had to do my job. To compensate the negative feelings that surrounded us (I think some of the kids are in their respective puppy love thing too, judging by their reactions), I gave some good sides of being in love at young age. I told them one has to be smart balancing reality and the joy of being in love. Juliet beamed out of sudden when I did that.

Just wow...