F*** You

Well today’s class was interesting.   Guess what my students couldn’t wait to talk to me about.  All nine of them couldn’t wait to give me the finger and tell me that it meant F*** you.  Apparently, from what I could piece together between the shouting and hand gestures, was that a foreign student had taught them this at school today.  They had absolutely no understanding that this was something that you do not do towards a teacher.  So after scooping my jaw up off the floor, I tried to cover up my shock and downplay the “badness” of this behaviour.  They just thought that it meant that two people wanted to fight each other.  They were all hysterical with laughter to the point of tears and my boss was peering into the classroom to see what all the hooplah was about.  

I endured twenty minutes of them giving me finger in between fits of laughter.  It finally ended with me explaining to them that if they were to do that in an English school then they would be sent to the principal.  Then I had to explain what a principal was.  It kind of took the seriousness out of the situation.  To put things into perspective, this was the class where I confiscated three exacto knives last week because they love cutting things up and throwing them in class or carving into their books when they think I’m not looking.  They are an awesome group of kids but they are so rambunctious that I feel like I should be using a lasso to rope them in, hog tie them, and then gag them just so I can get some silence to teach.  I let them have their fun today because tomorrow they have a final test that has these poor kids stressed to the max and I just accepted this behaviour as proof that they were finally cracking under pressure.  

So that’s just a little peek into my classes.  Wait until you hear what scandalous phrase I had to explain to my university students…