The little darlings are back. In classrooms across the country, their upturned faces, their eager minds and, oh yes, their pierced body parts and curled lips - they're all back to school, eager to challenge those brave people who stand up at the front of classrooms and dare to try and be a teacher.

John St. Godard is one of them. And this morning, he brings us an essay:

"Why I Teach"

When an old friend learned I was teaching high school, she laughed and said something about "payback time". As if becoming a teacher were my karmic path to atonement. The last 15 years should then have been unbearable, a life sentence of “hard time” imposed as punishment for my own adolescent crimes. But you know what? They haven't been bad. And part of the reason is that I don't have time to wonder about karmic paths or paybacks.

I teach English-As-A-Second-Language at a Montreal arts school called F.A.C.E., where kinetic kids belt out Happy Birthday in two languages and three part harmonies. When we’re not busy singing (I lip-synch) one of my objectives is to save future employers from my students' English bloopers – in song and on paper.

Case in point. I have a boy in Secondary One who refuses to capitalize the personal pronoun "I". And since I teach five levels –- my school runs from Kindergarten to Grade 11 -- I've been circling his little i's for years.

“When you write about yourself,” I tell him, “as in ‘I love English,’ (he groans) the “I” is ALWAYS capitalized. Okay?”

He's a nice boy, but he will not be broken. I've tried everything short of faking a faint in front of him. No dice. Sympathetic teachers suggest positive reinforcement: Reward his qualities and lighten up, they tell me. Put away your red pen and stop threatening the boy with farm labour. Bewildered older colleagues suggest lines for Pronoun Boy - hundreds of lines, as punishment. But whose punishment? I can see the lines now: “I wrote these lines for you.” The number 4, the letter U. “4U” Get it?

But Pronoun Boy is not alone. He has a powerful ally - the prettiest girl at F.A.C.E. School. She dots her little i's with tiny pink hearts. After reading one of her papers, Pronoun Boy began dotting his i's with happy faces. The smitten young boy version of girly hearts. Happy faces.

My solution is to buy the latest version of Understanding and Using English Grammar by Betty Azar. I tell my students the good news. A few boys cough and dig for their hacky sacs. Girls giggle and pass grammatically incorrect notes.

I explain that we’ll be reviewing apostrophes. A boy looks up. Finally. He raises his hand and like a man starving on a desert island, I rush to him.

"Yes?"

"What’s apostrafees?" he asks.

My toes curl.

I bite my tongue.

It's nearly the weekend. I drift to the window for a hazy view of the city and imagine a classroom where correct apostrophes grace sentences that begin with capital letters and end with periods. I'm giggling. Paragraphs are indented with catchy topic sentences. Students demand extra work for the weekend. Crying uncontrollably, I high-five them on their perfect test scores.

But I emerge from my imaginary bubble and blink myself back to reality. Turning, I search the boy's goofy rictus for signs of a practical joke. None. Suddenly I'm exhausted. I consider inviting Pronoun Boy to toss me out the window.

But my class is waiting. I take a deep breath.

"An apostrophe -"

"But we’ve done apostrophes" a girl says, “we already know all this.”

The conundrum of why I teach bobs in front of me. I can already hear my friends at the gym: "Because you have two weeks off at Christmas and two months off in the summer."

But that doesn't help me now.

Remembering that I actually like being here does help. And the fact that I'm an English teacher in a French culture, also helps. I remind myself that this is the province that banned English on outdoor signs - where an American boy failed his English Second Language Exam because he couldn't read the French instructions. Considering my powerful opposition, teaching English in this province could be considered heroic.

But not in this room.

Thirty teenagers face me with half-cocked smirks and surging hormones. Pronoun Boy’s in another world now, probably scoring a Stanley Cup winning goal. And Heart Girl’s rating boys on a chart with a pink pen. But what more could I ask for? It's not as though I'm trying to save the world.

Besides, like my Uber Catholic McGill professor once told me, "It's been saved."