There is a reason I don't ever want to teach middle school aged children. The reason is, for the most part, they are incredibly annoying.

Around the ages of 9-12 kids take great joy in correcting other people. I'm sure it's even more fun when they get to correct an adult. So if one says, "It's 12:30." The preteen would say, "No it's not! It's 12:29 and a half!"

The preteen finds this to be a grand coup d'etat. Ah ha! The preteen outwits the adult once again!
This is something all kids do at some point. I had a penchant for correcting grammar myself.
The main reason it is so annoying is that what is corrected tend to be such minor details that to correct them is essentially nonsensical.

Really, does it matter if it’s 12:30 or 12:29 and a half? When someone is telling a story does “a apple” in stead of “an apple” cause a communication break down? If I say I live 30 minutes away instead of 22 miles away, do you still understand something about where I live?

So it goes that some people grow up, but remain in this stage of feeling superior to other by means of correcting them, by insisting on being right all the time, by refusing to accept anything but the literal meanings, or the ones that they themselves have pronounced acceptable.

I’ve noticed that these people, much like children, have no idea how annoying they are. They don’t pick up on all the cues that adults give when they are annoyed. They fail to show any acknowledgment when people respond poorly to them, or don’t respond to them at all.

I know one such person. Actually, I’ve know several such persons. In the past I decided a few of them needed someone to guide them on the way to be less annoying. Others of them I wanted to stab with my pencil.

This one I just try to ignore. I have no desire to be involved enough to guide or stab.

He asked me to pick up some ‘spring water’ from the store. The store was out of ‘spring water,’ so I bought ‘drinking water’ thinking that it’s pretty much the same. When I brought it back, he said, “That’s not ‘spring water,’ you might as well throw it away, nobody’s going to drink it unless you want to.”

’Yes, you’re welcome . . . Ass.’

That’s what I wanted to say. Instead I said, “Yes, I will drink it, because it’s drinking water.”

Thinking to myself, ‘Because I know that the difference between the two is the color of the packaging; and maybe, if the company is honest, the way in which the water comes to the surface.’

I grew up near a town in Pennsylvania called Cambridge Springs. It was a pretty popular resort destination in the late 1800s and early 1900s because of it’s “superior spring water.” My mother worked at the resort and she said people used to walk the board walk a quarter mile into the middle of a field to the spring. They would pay five cents for a glass of ‘spring water,’ not knowing that they were also taking showers in ‘spring water,’ and flushing their toilets with ‘spring water.’ It was all the same water. The only difference between ‘spring water’ and ground water (which is used to make ‘drinking water’) is that ‘spring water’ comes from a source that naturally raises to the surface. Some people think ‘spring water’ is the same as ‘mineral water,’ but that’s only the case when there are minerals in the ground from which the water springs.

Ass.