One of my fellow bus drivers the other day came close to walking off the job. The kids on his bus were giving him such fits that he had to switch with another driver and they drove each other's routes. He's a nice guy, but I wonder if he is going to be doing this job much longer.
Do any kind of job with kids, and you have to be thick skinned. Kids of a certain age can be sweet, exhausting, cruel, kind, mean, annoying, helpful, and hilarious all in the amount of time that it takes you to tie your shoes. They're kids. They have brains that are not fully formed as of yet, and since many in this day and age are coming from homes in which they are not being nurtured or disciplined or parented with any kind of consistency it's not suprising that many of them are jerks.
I'd like to think that I've developed a bit more tolerance in the 2+ years that I've been driving. This isn't to say that I don't dream at times of taking certain kids and throwing them off of the river bridge that we cross over every day. But I believe that most of us who deal with kids are in some small way enduring karma for the way that we acted when we were kids.
I was not a terrible kid, I guess, but I could be a bit of a bully and truly obnixious if I thought it deserved my obnoxion. When my two children today act up I don't like it but I see a lot of myself in them, and I see how I act with a lot of the same frustrations that my parents existed with me and my siblings. And so, maybe this makes me more charitable as I get a bit older. At least that's what I'd like to think about myself.
