5 May, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I just finished the third week of my class. And now it’s a 3-day holiday weekend. Hurrah! This has been a hellish week. The course I’m taking is notoriously difficult. And it’s been made more difficult because during the first week, one of my teammates dropped out, leaving us with four people instead of five. So we have to teach all his lessons in addition to ours, meaning that I have to teach almost every day. Grrrrrrr.
I’m not surprised he dropped out. During the first — and last — lesson he taught, the students terrorized him. He tried to lead a class discussion. The topic was:
Where were you on 9/11/01?
He wrote this on the board, with the date in the American format (m/d/y). This is obviously how people around the world refer to this date in history, regardless of how they write the date in their own countries. But the students immediately began to raise their hands. “We don’t understand that date.” Little lying bastards. My fellow teacher and teammate was very flustered by this point because the rest of his lesson had not gone well either. So he rewrote the date in the European way, but made a mistake:
9th September, 2001. Where were you?
[And for our next assignment...Where were you three days before Kennedy was shot?]
He was oblivious to his mistake, even though me and the other team members were signaling to him from the back of the classroom. And the students took full advantage of this error. They claimed they could not possibly remember where they were on the 9th of September, 2001. And they were laughing. To complicate matters, several of the troublemakers hail from countries that, while not quite “Axis of Evil,” are close cousins. So my fellow teacher thought they were just being insensitive to what had happened on 9/11.
And things went downhill from there.
After this disastrous class, he fled and refused to come back. In fact, right in the middle of the class he was teaching he said he considered “doing a runner.” I really want to kill this guy for being a quitter and adding so much work to my life. During one of our planning sessions this week, I remarked to my teammates: “If I see Steve, I’m going to tell him off.”
“Oh no,” a guy in my group said. “No. If we see Steve…we drown him.”
Right about now, that sounds like a good idea. But at least it’s Friday. And I have three days off. Excuse me now while I pass out…
Anglofille said @ 12:22 am | student life |
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Rebecca Says:
May 5th, 2007 at 2:03 amYeah… sounds like that poor guy was the conductor of his very own trainwreck. At worst, he could have played up his mistakes and joked about it. At best, he could have commented “as it was an event that took place in the United States and has historic significance, I have use US dating” or something. But for him to give up and leave you all with more work is really crappy of him. You’d think if he’s behaving like this that he would have dropped out long ago.
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jen Says:
May 5th, 2007 at 2:02 pmEnjoy the weekend!
