The Awesomeness Goes On.

I recently attended the graduation ceremony for my postgraduate studies. I now officially have a Master's degree and despite that fact, one of the books that I am using as a teacher, suggests that I wear a lion's mask to entertain a six-year-old. Now THAT's degrading.

If you disregard this however, the rest of my classes remain quite cool. I was correcting some exercises of one of my groups a couple of days ago, and here’s what some of my eleven-year-olds wrote when they had to practice on conditionals:

#1 “If I go to the hairdresser’s, I will get a perm.”

(The student who wrote that was a boy.)

#2 “Unless I join the gym, I will go to the restaurant.”

(It’s either one or the other, clearly).

On my way to another classroom, I heard a student addressing another student in all seriousness: “You won’t be kicking me today cause my leg hurts”. (?!) I then got to the classroom, where a ten-year-old boy immediately greeted me with “Miss, is it OK if my essay is a bit… violent?”. “Show me”, I said. And here’s what he had written, on an essay the topic of which was to write a story starting with “Yesterday evening I went to the cinema with my sister Mary”:

“Yesterday evening I went to the cinema with my sister Mary. While we were walking, we saw our friend Margy. We decided to go to the cinema when Margy went to the street when a bus killed her! We were looking for her but she was stuck on the bus!”

The paragraph was followed by this drawing:

 

And a post-scriptum saying “I wrote this essay because Margy had told me the other day that I have psychological problems”. (Margy is one of his classmates). Personally, I believe that Margy was onto something.

A couple of days later, I had the pleasure of teaching my favourite group, the seventh-graders. I gave them a test, during which a student was mumbling:

Me: “Please stop that...”

Other student: “No, Miss, let him. I’ve trained him to say the correct answers out loud.”

And the same student, half an hour later: “Miss, you can correct our tests now. I already took the liberty of calling 911.”

On a different day but again while teaching the same group, I had my back turned and I was writing on the board when I heard students talking and I said (without turning to look at them): “John, be quiet please.”

John: “How did you…?! I don’t know where the hell that extra pair of eyes of yours is located.”

And a bit later on, when they asked me for a favour:

Me: “Yes. No. Alright, yes.”

Student: “I love your decisiveness.”

And I love my job, dear child, I really do.

You Only Like Your Own.

You know all those adorable things adults say about children, praising the sound of their “uncontrollable laughter”, their “unlimited imagination” or their “pure, longed-for by adults, innocence”? Right. All this is nice and lovely but some children are a tad bizarre. The other day, when I had just left the classroom and another teacher had entered, I heard a usually very quiet and low-profile eight-year-old boy yell at another boy:

“Girl?? You called ME a GIRL???” and with that he threw a book at the boy who had uttered the unforgivable insult. A loud “BANG” was heard and then there was silence.

No, no one died. Or got hurt. Or anything dramatic. The child ducked and the book hit the wall instead. Cunning lad. As for the incident, I’m not quite sure how it ended.

A little girl came to me the other day complaining that one of the boys had kicked her during the break and I'm preeeeeetty sure she had started it. The following image immediately came to my mind:

                          

As for them being innocent, fine, perhaps I can accept that. Sometimes. That does not mean that nine-year-olds do not say things that you would never expect a child age to say at that age. However, they definitely get worse as they grow up. For example, grown-ups are undoubtedly way more earth-bound and that is not necessarily a good thing. Just the other day I realised how much of a cynic I've become when I saw a flashcard with the words “chicken-cow-pig” on it and I immediately categorised them as “meat” instead of “animals”. Gee.

What I love about some children though, is when they have already developed a sense of humour. This cracks me up - maybe too much for my own good. Last week, in my class that consists of 12 and 13-year-old boys, the following happened when I asked a question:

Student 1: “Uh uh uh uh uh, miss, uh uh uh me, me, me!”

Student 2: “Dude, you sound like a dog.”

These particular students though still can be a tad annoying when they don’t write their names on their projects. Or when they write their classmates’ names, which they find particularly amusing...

As with adults, there are all different types of kids. Annoying, funny, sweet, weird, even creepy. There's at least one of every kind. But one thing is for sure... I'm starting to understand why it is claimed that children are “like farts: you only like your own.”