ABSTRACT
A wet ‘glob’ of toilet paper lands—splat—on the head of a teacher who suspects that they were targeted. A story of a teacher’s experience amidst muck-up day unfolds. A year twelve tradition of rioting on the last day of school, where on this occasion, the rioting spread a little further than anticipated. Through the story, the complexity of emotion is drawn out, particularly how difficult it is to name emotion. Eight notable emotions in teachers’ work are discussed: contentment, happiness, love, defeat, frustration, worry, anger and sadness. Sometimes, by naming emotion we simplify what it is, for example, anger does not exist in isolation—it is always clustered with other emotions and how people experience and display anger differs from person to person at any given time and is also influenced by collective attitudes to anger. These nuances feed into what might remain unknown about the experiences we live.
