Every so often in life, we will encounter moments when we realize something is amiss. It can be a big dramatic revelation that changes your life entirely, or a small little thing you picked up on.
Since becoming a teacher, people like to ask me either what has teaching been like, or how are the students. Most of the time I don't have a short answer because it's too big of an experience to squeeze into 2 lines. So, I sort of say the first thing that comes to mind.
When people ask me how my students are, I don't have much of a judgement on them because they are neither good kids nor bad. So I say the one thing that as a class, they seem to have moreso than other classes or even batches. Which is that they have overwhelmingly good handwriting.
And this is the part when you realize people aren't really listening. So far, at least 2 people have said "Oh, (start leading into another topic)" I mean talking about their handwriting is definitely something people don't expect to hear. Maybe that they are naughty or nice or muggers or whatever. People who are generally interested in what your are talking about will maybe extend the conversation like saying that's unexpected, or try to guess reasons for nice handwriting (are they mostly girls?) or maybe even change direction to something that they were kind of expecting (but what about their attitude, or but are they a clever bunch of kids).
When people ask you something and they don't seem to react to that news, you know they are not interested in you (or your students) but more of a polite acknowledgement before moving on to what they really want to talk about.
It's always funny to find out that people are really listening, because they think they are putting on a good show of pretending to be interested, but the speaker can totally see through it.
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