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.