A picture of me drawn by one of the Hell's Satans
You can never really know what you are made of unless you test yourself, put yourself in a position of suffering, and see just how much guff you can take before you crack. For me it is about 89 minutes. My self-inflicted challenge comes in the form of hour and a half classes teaching a dozen non-anglicized wild things. If you have ever tried to discipline a classroom of 10yr olds, you know half of my pain. If you have ever tried to negotiate a treaty with hostile cannibals through gestures and smiling, you know the other half.
I have never seen behavior like this before in my life. Not in class, not at lunch, not at recess, not even in summer camp where abhorrent behavior was recommended by the stoned counselors (we had a counselor try to talk us into playing “William Tell”). I wish I had a videotape of yesterday’s class to submit to “America’s Most Horrified and Completely Outgunned Teachers”. My company was forced to merge two classes as an emergency measure to avoid calling parents and telling them that demon-sitting would have to be canceled for the evening. 20 minutes before show time I was informed, via text message, of my imminent destruction.
After arriving for my lesson, hopelessly under prepared, I am informed by my snarling and jaded-to-the core colleague that “these kids have some slight behavior problems and I wanted to give you the heads up…”
I was biding my time, watching the clock tick down to the hour, and playing through possible scenarios in my head. My odds were not looking so good, here is why:
1)
I do not speak Czech
The students, for all intensive purposes, only speak Czech
I do not have enough materials for 20 kids
The two classes use different books
The two classes are different levels
I am afraid and children can smell fear and it makes them drunk and wild with power.
I contemplate: I am wearing a tie which could easily be used to hang myself from the window before it is too late. Class begins.
Here is an example of an assignment completed by a student on the prepositions on, near, in, by, out of, far from:
I wish I could fully communicate the caricature of chaos that took place. It is as if there is some playbook that all these little buggers study before coming into class (it reminds me of the Colts no-huddle, a diabolical choice, no doubt chosen so they can run a constant offensive attack on me to keep me from devising a way to defend myself). The scene was complete with flying paper, gel-pen tattooing, games of bloody-knuckles, pornographic doodling, ripping and crumpling of assignments, and topped off with the new Czech addition of repeatedly shouting one word over and over like a chorus of twisted howler monkeys rousing for a gang rape on an unsuspecting sloth.
There were all the stereotypical maligned prototypes, fat-kid-with-anger, girl-with-no-father, over-medicated-child, sugar-holic-kid, brother-hits-me-so-I-gonna-hit-you-boy, lets-see-if-I-can-eat-it-child, and frustrated-Asian-who-is-way-more-motivated-and-less-likely-to- go-to-prison-for-a-“blue collar"-crime-kid, making for a rich scientific experiment in the prime factors contributing to an under-disciplined lot of hooligans.
It was a sad sight. There was no hope to begin with, but dammit I tried.
