Respeto

Today was my first adventure into disciplining teenagers.

They are learning clothing vocab and descriptive words, so they were doing a pair activity where they were given a place at random (a party, the theater, grandma's house etc.) and they had to write a good, juicy descriptive paragraph about what they would wear to that place.

They worked well enough, my vietnamese gangster student of course happened to choose "a party" as his place. So after making it clear that our paragraphs have to be school appropriate (he wrote about a "fiesta limpia" -clean party- where they get dressed up and play spanish games - he's one of my favorite students. He's sharp, witty and a total sass) they wrote some okay paragraphs.

After writing for a while, I asked them to go to the podium and share their paragraph with the class. They were absolutely thrilled as you can imagine but they at least played along until one pair of students got up to share.

As this pair began to read, someone sitting in the front made some sort of comment, whether about the girls or not, I can't be sure, I didn't hear them, but whatever was said, the comment sent out a wave of giggles through the class. One of the girls, being a very regal little thing gave the giggling morons a very strict teacher look and said "And what is the laughing about?". This of course sent another shockwave of giggles through the immature masses. I was pissed but as I was about to say something they settled on their own. I was still pissed, but I wanted to let the girls read their paragraph so we moved on for the moment.

After this little sharing session, there were only a few minutes left of the hour so I passed out the homework. They began to work on it as I stared at them for a moment.

I looked around and began to tell them a story.

"During the summer I work at Encompass daycare for their summer camp program."

::their faces roused...they like when I tell stories::

"Yea, I work with 7-11 year olds"

student - "Woah, that's crazy"

"No, their a lot of fun. I like that age group. We have to have a lot of talks about respect though."

::I start to see some "uh-oh" faces in the crowd::

(picture me with a very matter-of-fact, slightly cocky, i-am-disgusted-with-your-behavior-face) "Yea, we do a lot of talking about creating a respectful classroom, listening to our friends when they talk, respecting one another, their opinions, their ideas and their rights. We have to have a lot of sit-down talks about these kinds of things. So if we need to have a talk like that in here, I'm very well practiced. If I need to make that speech, just let me know, I have a really good one"

::ahhh the faces of shame, regret and dissapointment::

Ha. Little buggers. I crushed them and they didn't even see it coming.