Bert & Ernie Founded Rome. so, do you feel like a teacher yet?

I remember thinking my teachers back in grade school were barely people. They were figures who’d always show up to class wearing unflattering pumps, a flowered dress and beads. Somehow or another they’d maintain order over a class of 35 lackadaisical children of various temperaments and ages. They clearly didn’t have lives outside of the classrooms. During summer vacation they would hole up in coffins somewhere, packing in their textbooks, red pens and stickers tightly around them, until September rolled around and they had some purpose in life again.

It is a queer feeling to be on the other side of the desk these days. Instead of being able to sit behind a desk and fiddle with my keitai or doodle cartoons characters on my notebook whilst dreaming about what I’m going to do the moment I escape the shackles of the classroom, I have to actually look alert and jovial for fifty consecutive minutes and must have SOMETHING of value to say to these children. The last quality is somewhat unimportant as they don’t understand anything I’m saying. I could be reciting a bawdy poem in Latin or a dirty Irish limerick and they would sit there and nod encouragingly. Just the other day I did a dramatic poetic recitation of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boi.” It makes absolutely no difference. But it still staggers me that these teenagers look up at me expectantly with their pencils posed, ready, for the most part, to do my bidding.

With the position of being a ‘teacher’ comes the duty of making exams. My supervisor asked me to make up exactly half of the midterm for our Foreign Affairs class. Being excited to finally have the opportunity to display my professional teaching skills and elated that all of those days playing ‘school’ with my sister in the basement were going to come in useful, I whipped up a show-stopper of an exam and stupidly didn’t bother to think how I was going to grade them afterwards. I assumed they would all get 100 since I was making it duck soup. Afterwards, I would just happily plaster each one with a mass of stickers.

I gave the students 28 questions and 3 bonus questions – a nice awkward number divisible by absolutely nothing. Clearly I was a humanities major in college. I used to get seriously irked when my crappy Latin graduate student professor in college would take of -.24839 points in bright red pen for forgetting a macron or some such nonsense but alas, I, too, have fallen prey to the nettlesome invention that is math.

I sat there punching away on my keitai calculator trying to round up and give the students the benefit of the doubt for most questions – “sure, they left it blank but surely they meant A.” “She wrote B, but definitely had C before. I can see the eraser markings! That’s got to count for something.” I thought I had made the thing incredibly simple. The questions only had three choices so there was OVER a thirty percent chance that even a blind squirrel could get the question right. Two of the choices I attempted to make so ludicrous that no rational person would pick them, but my efforts were in vain:

According to one student I am from New York but my nationality is British. Another one believes I’m from England, but at the same time Canadian. As I whack my head repeatedly against the desk it becomes clear they were not listening to a WORD I was saying. Nor did the pictures make any impact on their dense little skulls. I gave them a few fill-in-the-blank-questions and was astounded when one girl couldn’t even fill in:

About the ALT:
1) What is her name?
You little bitch. What a slap in the face. I figured that would be an easy 1.78948 points right there. I am HANDING it to you on a golden platter inlaid with rubies. I guess it goes to the blind squirrel instead.

I had given all the students a map of the United States nicely hand labeled with several major cities, the oceans, and the surrounding lands of Mexico and Canada. But to my chagrin they still insisted upon circling that the US has 80 states and Canada is to the east of the US. Perhaps they were all studying an abstract Jackson Pollock rendition of a US map.

Another section of the test was based on a slideshow presentation I made for them about Italy. I talked and the JTE translated so that they could hear it in Japanese as well. I taught them how to bloody say ‘hello’ in Latin. I repeated over and over again that they spoke LATIN in ROME and yet they adamantly insisted in telling me that in ancient times English was the language of choice in Italy. English isn’t the language of choice in Italy NOW, you little cretins, why would it be so then? My other favorite answers were that Bert and Ernie were the founders of Rome and that the Pope is the head of the Islamic church.

A couple of the girls did manage to do exceptionally well so that gave me some hope. It’s going to be a long few months before I’m able to crawl back to that coffin of mine clutching my red pens and stickers.

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Published:
10.13.06 / 5pm
Category:
classroom antics