I love you I hate you

There is another problem with the students. They're loud and rude and annoying and speak much better Spanish than I do; we've been over that. And they stay loud and rude and annoying because I suck at discipline in general and am intimidated by the thought of enforcing it in Spanish; we've been over that, too. But do you know what else? I also sort of like them. Not all of them. And it does me no good, because they don't like me back and liking them just makes it harder to tell them to shut the fuck up or get out of my class. But some of them are nice and some of them are adorable and some of them are hilarious. There's this one kid who looks just like the yellow-eyed bully from A Christmas Story (the movie with Ralphie), except that his eyes aren't yellow and he's always smiling. Except for the time he got frustrated trying to do some computer thing and said joder and then turned red and apologized profusely. It was super cute. We have these seminars where the students have to present homework problems and one girl actually used my made-up terminology of theta-sombrero. They kept asking me if solutions to the problems would be posted online (it's not really my decision) and when I told them half-exasperated that they'd asked me four times already and the answer was still "I don't know," someone said "But you're the professor! Why don't you know!?" A certain other professor who's in charge of the course and these types of decisions would have killed the kid, but it made me laugh. And then, while someone was presenting his problem, someone else came to ask me a question and I started answering it and then he had another question and I was sort of enjoying being able to sort of answer his questions and then I realized I was barely even whispering. Why didn't I tell him to ask me after class? Sigh. At my best I'm just as bad as they are.