Saturday, June 26, 2004
Red-handed
I knew it would happen eventually. I go to college, spend time with people who use coarse language casually, and then I go to work with kids. Eventually, I was going to slip. It happened a couple of days ago. After the kids did there math, I would go to a couple of the advanced ones and give them harder long division problems. Eventually, they decided to give me much harder long division problems. I was doing one, thought I'd made a mistake, and muttered "cra....." under my breath. Immediately, the one sitting next to me, said:
"Hey, you just said crap!"
"Noooooo....I said cra."
"No, what the fuck, you just said crap!"
The clever little bastard obviously thought "Hey, if the teacher swears, I can swear too!" But while the conversation before then had been quiet enough that only we knew it, he said "What the fuck!" loud enough that other kids in the class gasped and looked over at us. I immediately said his name sternly, but the other kids were already saying "Did he? What happened?" and so on. I went into panicked policeman mode, and said "Nobody said anything. Nobody heard anything. Go back to work!"
Amazingly, that worked. The kids probably cuss enough that it wasn't that big of a deal, and since I didn't make more of it, they let it slide. Or maybe they all thought they had misheard. Or maybe they figured that any teacher, hearing a student cuss, would immediately punish him, and since I hadn't punished the kid, he obviously hadn't cussed. One of them noticed that I had turned bright red, but other than that, that was the end of it.
I knew it would happen eventually. I go to college, spend time with people who use coarse language casually, and then I go to work with kids. Eventually, I was going to slip. It happened a couple of days ago. After the kids did there math, I would go to a couple of the advanced ones and give them harder long division problems. Eventually, they decided to give me much harder long division problems. I was doing one, thought I'd made a mistake, and muttered "cra....." under my breath. Immediately, the one sitting next to me, said:
"Hey, you just said crap!"
"Noooooo....I said cra."
"No, what the fuck, you just said crap!"
The clever little bastard obviously thought "Hey, if the teacher swears, I can swear too!" But while the conversation before then had been quiet enough that only we knew it, he said "What the fuck!" loud enough that other kids in the class gasped and looked over at us. I immediately said his name sternly, but the other kids were already saying "Did he? What happened?" and so on. I went into panicked policeman mode, and said "Nobody said anything. Nobody heard anything. Go back to work!"
Amazingly, that worked. The kids probably cuss enough that it wasn't that big of a deal, and since I didn't make more of it, they let it slide. Or maybe they all thought they had misheard. Or maybe they figured that any teacher, hearing a student cuss, would immediately punish him, and since I hadn't punished the kid, he obviously hadn't cussed. One of them noticed that I had turned bright red, but other than that, that was the end of it.