Your experiences with profanity in the classroom.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I grew in a rural area of missouri, and was in high school in the early 80’s. Back then, one of the worst things you could do in a high school classroom was say a curse word. Fuck was the ultimate word, shit was a close second. Hell and Damn don’t count.

I remember during my junior year, we had a really cool teacher for our journalism class. It was toward the end of the school year, and everyone in the class was a senior, except me. everyone in the class was good friends and also considered the teacher a good friend too. Anyway, one day during class, one of my classmates asked if she could tell a joke and the teacher said yes. I actually don’t remember the joke, but the punchline was, “A short, little blue fucker, about this tall”. I remember being a bit shocked, and was fully prepared for this teacher to at least scold her for using profanity, but then laugh at the joke. Well, she didn’t really scold her and just giggled a little bit. I thought this was really cool.

My second experience was when I heard the high school football coach call the football team, “a bunch of pussies”. I was waiting for my friend, who was the on the team. I wasn’t as shocked by this.

The third time was when we were reading a play in our drama class. When it came to our teachers turn to read her lines, one of the words was “shit”. And she read over it wihout hesitation. And nobody laughed or even acknowledged that it was uttered.

The last time was when we had this kid in class who was the town hoodlum. He was pretty tough and every single kid in the school was secretly terrified of him. He was bad. In fact, about five years after my class graduated, this guy murdered someone and is currently serving a life term in the state penn. One day, we were in health class, in the basement of the school. There was a special ed class right next to ours. It’s kind of hard to explain, but the kids in the special ed class had to walk thru our health class in order to get to their classroom. This hoodlum guy was in that class. One day, we heard yelling inside the special ed room and he opened the door and said, “you fucking bitch, you’d better be on the lookout for me”. He got expelled, and that’s the last time I saw him.

When I watch certain movies, especially from the 70’s…movies about high school. I’ve noticed that sometimes the student, or rarely the teacher use profanity, as if it’s the norm. Was profanity in the high school classroom every ok?

I guess technically there was one other time I witnessed profanity, but it wasn’t IN school, and technically wasn’t verbal profanity. It was when I saw my high school gym teacher naked. And no, it’s not what you think.

2

Aw, go ahead and spill it. We won’t tell a soul. :slight_smile:

3

When I was a yute, I went to a private Christian school. We were all the most sheltered little lambs imaginable. One day, in about fourth grade, we had a substitute teacher, who obviously spoke English as a second language. She sent a boy up to the chalkboard to work a math problem, and when she saw the result, declared, “This? You do a…how you say…a half ass job.” Jaws hit the floor, there was a mass swooning. The tough kids laughed. We never saw that substitute again.

4

Ok, I’ll spill it. One day, during drivers ed class, our teacher wasn’t there and the principal was the substitute (it was a small school, he often substituted for teachers who had called in sick). We all (principal, me and two other students) got in the drivers ed car and the principal told the driver to go a certain route. We ended up on a blacktop road about 4 miles out of town, and from there we turned onto a gravel road. We stopped at the sick drivers ed teachers house (he was also the football coach and phys ed teacher) and the principal got out and grabbed a textbook and knocked on the door. The coach came to the door wearing a towel around his waist. We were still in the car, but parked directly of his solid glass front storm door. He glanced at us in the car and was startled and jumped back. During this jump, his towel fell off and I saw his penis. He wasn’t bad looking in the face, but he was about 50 pounds overweight. He had a roll of fat that just touched the north side of his pubic region. As I recall, he was somewhat blessed in his nether regions.

I’d always wondered why the principal took him a book. We all decided that since there was discussion between the two that took about 5 minutes, there must’ve been something going on. At one point, we did hear a voice being raised, but it was very brief.

After graduation, which was 5 months later, the drivers ed teacher married one of his students who had just graduated. I always wondered if these two situations were connected.

5

Why does the OP remind of the scene from American Pie? This one time at band camp…

6

Common refrain from my freshman and sophomore years in high school:

Dean of Student Discipline: “So, why are you in my office this time, Simmons?”
Me: “Mrs. C. sent me down here for using bad language in her class.”
Dean: “What, again?!”

7

In O-Grade French (say about 14/15) our teaching assistant, a swoonsome young French woman, opened up the class to questions, in order to help us with our vocabulary. Well, it turns out that the French have an equivalent for all the English swear words. Our teacher came in towards the end of that particular lesson, and was very amused. I suspect that this is what always happens in those circumstances.

8

We had an English project in which we were to analyze song lyrics. Part of it was to hand the printed lyrics out to the rest of the class. Since none of us had easy access to free copy machines, we gave our albums to the teacher, who’d photo copy them. If the lyrics wouldn’t scan right, she’d type them up.

Come to think of it, that must have been a big job for her.

Anyway, my approach was to compare lyrics from different albums by the same band. One of the albums copied just fine, but the other had to be typed. One of the songs had shit, the other had fuck. So she was apparently OK with handing those words out to her students.

Most of the kids didn’t like her, but I thought she was pretty cool.

This was probably in 1979.

9

Reminds me of this one time in drama where we had to perform Cinderella several times, reducing the duration each time until we were down to something like 30 seconds. I was asking one of the evil stepsisters to dance, and caught up in the speed of things, she just yells ‘FUCK NO’ at me. She slapped her hand over her mouth, I wasted a couple precious seconds in shock, and the look on our teacher’s face…her jaw dropped like the Scream mask. Then we all burst out laughing and it was all good. The stepsister was a goody two-shoes and one of my best friends, which is why it was memorable.

10

Hmmm…The Who?

11

That what? Third base!

It was Pink Floyd, probably Dark Side and Animals.

12

Mid to late nineties. There was no profanity allowed. No profanity was spoken to teachers. Of course kids said it to each other during times when no adults around, you can’t prevent that.

However, it was a private school (not-upscale though).

13

I was teaching in a very small rural town with about a 50/50 split between Latino kids (mostly from Mexico) and white kids. I and the other teacher (all of us white) knew the Latino kids were getting away with cursing in Spanish, but we didn’t know it well enough to catch them. One of the board members happened to be fluent in Spanish, English, and a couple of other languages, and he gave us some classes.

First class, he asked: “What do you need to know right now?” We all said, “we need to know the bad words.”

So, he taught us all the curse words he could think of and their variations.

Not one week later, I had a kid in art class who refused to do any work, so I bugged him until he finally got out his supplies and started to work, when I turned to walk away, he muttered “chingao tu madre”. (That is, “go fuck your mother.”). So I said, “Great, now you get to put all your supplies away and go to the office. I’ll let the principal know why when I see him at lunch.”

I will treasure the look on that little fuck’s face until my dying day. :smiley:

14

Mid-2000s here. Some teachers didn’t really care. Some used profanity themselves. I’m sure some really cared, but really caring wasn’t how the school worked.

There was really just a pervasive feeling of apathy generally. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. Swearing? Homosexuality? Math? None of it mattered when you’d spent so many years of your life on the assembly line. New students and teachers would come in full of spirit, and they’d eventually realize that they were in the Tartarus of Maids. Some realized what they’d gotten themselves into and got the hell out, but most just settled in and started blending in to the sepia-toned decor.

But it was a Good School; the state standardized tests said so.

15

Indeed. That story is actually weirder than probably anything anyone even imagined. WTF?

16

Hell, i grew up in goddamned Texas back in the goddamn 1940s and 1950s. No one and I mean no goddamn one would ever fucking dare to curse in those goddamn schools.

17

I didn’t encounter profanity in the classroom until college–and not until it was used by the professors. That is, unless you count reading it–something which you actually had to get a permission slip to be allowed to do, even in the advanced English class. And one uber-Chritian girl opted out, and the school could do nothing about it.

18

I curse. I’m not supposed to, but sometimes the language is just right. Not too hot, not too cold. Like “shit” for example - it slips when I drop something. And then I say, er, shoot! Sorry! Or I say, “Oh beeper barnacles!” when my computer freezes. The kids think I’m a total dork.

I said fuck once. Two students were getting into it and pushing each other and someone was about to get pounded. Both of you, sit the fuck down- now! while pushing one student towards a seat.

It all started when Student A started yelling “Fuck” at me and Student B said, “Don’t you fucking talk to my teacher like that, you little punk-ass [n word]!” and got up and started pushing Student A around.

I apologized for it later, but I was pissed. No fighting in class. They were in hysterics over it. “Oh, Miss, you shoulda seen your face! Sit the fuck down!” [high pitched imitation]

Another time I used my “Mom voice” to give a lecture about stealing. We had some new kids and all of the sudden, phones started missing. “If it’s not your shit, don’t touch it! Is that so damned hard?!” I also said that stealing was trashy as hell.

Yes, sometimes I have a potty mouth, but I think I use it in a weirdly appropriate context. But consider the kids I’m with. They swear (and I tell them not to) like it’s nothing.

So I pretty much reserve my swearing for You’re In Deep Shit moments. And the kids…they respond. If I did this in a white school a few miles down, I’d get written up and parents would be calling. But the time I said the f bomb in class? A new girl was there and she called her grandma later, saying, “This teacher said the word fuck!” and the grandmother said, “That’s my kinda teacher!” So everytime she talks to her grandma, the grandma says, “Hows the sit the fuck down teacher?” She doesn’t even know my name.

(I would like to add to my defense that the New Girl pegs me as her favorite teacher - and she respected me when I apologized for using the word in class. “Teachers never apologize for nothin’ - even if that kid deserved it, it was cool you said sorry. So I like you.”

:slight_smile:

19

I remember I had a (supposedly) super-Christian electronics teacher in highschool. I was born a christian but got disenchanted with it largely because of the messed up priorities of Christians like him.

So we were a few weeks into class and had gotten competant at soldering, but I wasn’t paying attention and burned the crap out of myself, and let out an inadvertant F-bomb. The teacher yelled at me REALLY harshly about it (at the time it seemed way harsher than I thought was appropriate, I came from an all-boys school the previous year where nothing would’ve ever gotten done if the teachers ribbed the boys everytime they cursed).

What really pissed me off, is he was angry about me using a four letter word, but not once did he ask me if I was okay at all. I think he was an overall good guy, but I’m pretty sure Jesus would’ve been more concerned with a 14 year old burning himself than an expletive shouted in pain.