Black Day

They changed my schedule while I was gone. I had no warning. All of the sudden, I'm up to six hours of classes on Monday, with two hours at once in my very worst class (the angry-at-the-world kids). I was in no way prepared for this; just getting through one hour with them is torture. Two hours is inconceivable. Not only that, but The Man has decided to divide one of my other classes in to two "modules," which increases my overall teaching load.

My 10th graders showed up first thing and started whining about their quiz; one kid kept (literally) screeching at me that he was absent all last week until finally I just told him to sit down and shut up before I smashed his face in. (I said it in English, which makes it easier to get away with.)

After this I went to my 11th grade class, but no one was there, and the next thing I know, some guy from the office is running down the hall telling everyone to evacuate the building. I asked another teacher what was going on, but she didn't know. I went outside and got knocked to the ground by a mob of kids running off campus... to watch a fight. Seriously? We evacuated the building because there was a fight going on outside? In what universe does that make sense??

Eventually I herded my students back inside, but at this point they were wild. Now, in the U.S., this sort of thing happens all the time and I don't really have a problem reestablishing order. Here, I'm at an utter loss: I don't have enough command of my subject to take control of the lesson, and I'm not adept enough at French to intimidate them properly. In other words, they can walk all over me and they know it. This has never, ever happened to me before in my teaching career, even in the the depths of the Mississippi ghetto. I have always been able to keep my kids in line. Not here.

I've made jokes before about locking myself in the bathroom to cry, but today I actually did it. Twice. In the same hour. My colleague Stéphane told me I looked "quite tired," which is a euphemism, I suppose, for "like you've been bawling your eyes out for twenty minutes." I agreed that I was, indeed, quite tired and also I was having some allergy problems (which we both knew was a lie but allowed me to salvage my dignity). He was trying very hard to be helpful and gave me a copy of the lesson he's using with the class we have in common. I looked at it (a text on the history of the Internet) and thanked him profusely then locked myself into the bathroom to cry some more because this is part of my problem. This is the kind of lesson they give-- the history of the Internet, people-- and I'm supposed to find a way to engage academically-challenged students whose grasp of English is extremely poor with a two-hour lesson involving expressions like network, Internet gateway and linked via telephone wires.

When the two-hour group showed up, they were fighting mad, assuming I'd requested the schedule change. I was exhausted and defeated and finally just said, listen, I don't particularly want to spend two hours with you either, but we're stuck with each other so let's figure out a way to make it tolerable. I asked them to write an anonymous note describing what they want the course to be: we could spend all our time preparing their end-of-year exam, which is dry, thankless work involving analyzing texts and images; or we could start from zero and relearn English all over again. (Most of them have a shaky grasp of the language at best.) I said I'm more accustomed to working with beginners and would probably want to do ridiculous interactive games and skits which would seem childish and beneath their dignity, but in the end might actually allow them to speak English.

I guess this went a ways towards restoring good will (how, I don't really know), because they were fairly cooperative for the godawful Internet article. We got through the day and I finally got home, and my mother used her psychic mom powers and called so that I could cry some more and get snot all over the phone.

I've decided that today is my Black Day, the point that I look back on and say, "Yeah, that was it. That was the worst day. Everything got easier after that."

So, there it is. My Black Day is over. Everything will be easier after this.