My, That’s A Smutty Map

Eighty-eight virile eyes under feminine, effete eyebrows peer at me. Some are puzzled. Some are prying. Some are twinkling. Some are just plain glazed over, bleary from their nap during the previous class. I run through my spiel. It’s old hat by now, but just as people vary, so do reactions.

The boys twitter in class as I draw a map of the United States on the blackboard. To a fifteen or sixteen year old boy the proper, austere, Puritan, well-buckled, northeastern states of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire become something of an amusement. Projecting upward my innocent map becomes smutty, dirty, priapic low-grade porn. The northeastern states and I both blush as a boy jumps up from his seat to mimic the map and gesture grandly with his hands.

Curious students, those students who bring intelligent questions and contributions to the class, are a staple in any productive class. I relish questions that liven up students’ minds and cause synapses to fire rapidly and joyous learning to take place. It’s these eager, inquisitive minds that make classes worth going to. These questions are like oxygen.

And then there are the filthy questions that come from left field and leave one wondering exactly how much one should be teaching these children, and just how much they already know:

A boy is being prodded from all sides by his surrounding friends. They continue to spur him on until he eventually and grudgingly rises from his seat and looks at me.

“DO IT. JUST DO IT. DON’T BE SUCH A PANSY, YUKI” his friends urge him.

He looks at me and looks back down again.

Oh the suspense.

Finally he comes around.

“…bah gee eye niyah.”

Is it a question? A statement?

“Care to run that by me one more time?”

He repeats himself a few more times, each time the word seeming more and more convoluted. My brain tosses the broken syllables around, trying to imagine what a fifteen-year-old boy could possibly be trying to say to me. They are rushed through the Japanese and English filofaxes but no matches are found. A bold http 404 message flashes.

I look over at my JTE thinking that perhaps he has a vague idea of the precious statement that the student is attempting to convey. He is perched on his stool, his bum leg resting comfortably. His false teeth grin back and me as he shrugs, “I don’t know what he is saying.”

There stand two sorry pieces of work: A native English speaker and a Japanese teacher of English who has two well worn complete Oxford English dictionaries standing on his desk. We have just finished having a conversation about nanotechnology in the staffroom and we can’t fathom what this boy is attempting so desperately to say.

“… BAH GEE EYE NIYAH”
“… BAH GEE EYE NIYAH!!”
“… BAH GEE EYE NIYAH!!!!!!11”

I look at my JTE and then my inner fifteen year old boy surfaces. I quickly look away.

The Japanese tongue has mangled the “v” and a heavy katakana accent has turned the word into something almost unrecognizable.

He has just given me the opposite of my apparently smutty, phallic map on the board.

But is it a question? Is he asking for a definition? An in-depth lesson? Is he asking if I have one? Is he asking if he has one?

Perhaps another map might answer his question.

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Published:
6.1.07 / 4pm
Category:
classroom antics, amusing incidents, what i call life