I teach English to bored teenagers. We play the perpetual game of them spending eighty times the effort seeing where the boundaries are vs. actually doing the work.
OK, no problem, that’s part of the job. I push back and they know it’s time to pretend to look duly contrite. All part of the dance that we must do.
One girl has decided that her mother has too much money which should be wasted on this extracurricular study and is determined to make it meaningless. I don’t care, I get paid regardless of any net increase or decrease of synaptic connections at the end of class for any particular pupil.
But, they can’t interfere with the learning of other kids and this girl has decided that it’s better to be funny than smart. She refused to participate in an activity. Fine, do some written work instead. Nope? OK, you don’t like the rules, go down and explain to the school management why you are a special snowflake.
At some point, this becomes a public speech to the whole class on the options they have. Study or not, we have rules and as I said:
“In this classroom, these rules must be followed.” suddenly the lightening which had been in the distance, struck really close. The windows lit up and shook from the thunder. The class jumped.
My first thought was that it was a reference to something, just because of its form, even if I didn’t know the source. My second thought was that even if it wasn’t alluding to anything specific, that it was obviously in jest. I imagined his saying it in a Foghorn Leghorn voice.
My wife once dealt with a wise-ass high school student by telling her to teach the class, if she thought she could do better than the teacher. The kid, to her credit, took the challenge and fell apart after 15 minutes of dealing with all the other students’ misbehavior. She was much more pleasant in class after that.
Full points for the story, but for the record, it’s “I the Lord have spoken…”. You’re probably thinking of “thou hast” or “he/she hath”. Or possibly just “The lord has spoken,” which is sometimes said in church after reading of scriptures.
That reminds me of a story about a teacher asking the class for a sentence beginning with ‘I’.
The kindy kids use simple sentences (‘I have 2 cats’; ‘I am going to swim tonight’ etc).
One kid says ‘I is…’ and the teacher interrupts - ‘No! I AM.’
‘Okay. I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.’
But, seriously, “I, the Teacher, Has Spoken”?? ‘I, your teacher, hath spoken’ would be okay; ‘Listen to the word of your Lord and teacher’ would be quite funny.
And ‘I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My lessons. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.’ would be EPIC!
I once told a kid to ‘Do that again! I dare you … I DOUBLE dare you’ on a beach in France. Got a few waves from other (adult) bathers, after that. She didn’t do it again.
You may be forgetting that in many foreign countries, an “English teacher” would just be called an “English speaker” at home. In my experience teaching ESL in many cases doesn’t have any requirements other than being born in an English-speaking country.
