My co-teacher, Mr. Cho, is lecturing on something like formal letters. Like: Dear Sir or Madame, I am pleased, I regret, I look forward to hearing from you, In summation, With the greatest appreciation, Sincerely, Respectfully — all that jazz. What is a letterhead? Can anyone tell me what a letterhead is? So many needless, useless words. Clutter, clutter, stop and shutter.
He’s drawing on the board and the students in the front are copying what he is writing — a few of them — others are talking and hitting and throwing pieces of paper like hand grenades (big, beautiful arcs). One student has a rubrik’s cube colorful as the darkness after a punch in the nose, and he’s twisting it back and forth with frustrating zeal. I am Shiva, the the destroyer of all fun and hope and joy in this classroom, so I tell him to put it away by placing my hand on his shoulder and giving him the hey-put-that-cube-away look, which I’ve been practicing in the mirror. “Okay, okay” he says and quickly opens an empty notebook and pretends to begin copying what’s on the board.
“Okay, okay” I say back. “Copy what’s up there or I’ll copy you.”
Yeah, you tell him, killer. You’ll copy him, alright! Like a xerox machine! What does that mean, you idiot? The air conditioning has stopped working so not only am I sweating, but my ability to threaten students coherently is degenerating quickly.
There are sixty students per class and I have twenty-two classes on my schedule. Could you do the math, and then when you have the answer keep it yourself? I don’t want to know. I am concentrating on four students at a time, only. I’m breaking them up into tolerable little packets, even numbers within a fixed space, and everything else is background noise, like crickets, or 54 monkeys who have just dropped into the classroom from low branches and are hooting and throwing peices of paper and playing with rubik’s cubes. Smart monkeys. Loud monkeys. Thai monkeys.
Boys are boys after all, and there are sixty of them in this room, two or three next to each other on benches and slanted desks, sweating and scratching away against paper and wood. I am trying to keep some iota of control, but managing the noise is like holding back a flood with a dyke constructed from tissue paper.
“When you sign your name at the bottom, you must also write your full name under it!” announces Mr. Cho with a slight rise in his voice at the end. Mr. Cho is Burmese, with French citizenship, and impeccable English. “Do you understand?”
“Who understands?” I parrot to the garrulous sixty, the boys of Saint Gabriel’s, angelic in their white shirts and blue shorts. “Who can tell Mr. Cho?”
“Yes!” one boys yells out. I turn around to see who said yes so I could give him a grateful smile and a pat on the back for saying something, anything resembling English — the language they should be learning from us — but I come across a boy finger spelunking in one of his cavernous nostrils, mining for precious ore.
I turn back around and another boy is now sitting on the floor picking up pieces of his pen. He shows me a wide grin and then lopes back over to his desk.
“Why were you on the floor? Couldn’t you have just knelt down?” I ask him. Not to punish him but because I’m actually curious. The boy is acned and his teeth glitter with metal that makes his deep voice sound wet.
“OKay. Sarry. I not do it again. I promise.”
“You should say, ‘I will not do it again.’”
“Yes, yes. Okay.”
He just wants me to go away and he begins copying what’s on the board. Eighth grade boys are almost universally smelly, awkward, and self centered. And they smell bad. A gross and exaggerated generalization, yes. But it’s making me feel better right now so deal with it.
There is more yelling from the back, some one stands on a desk and now Mr. Cho has beckoned a boy to the front of the room and is making him do push ups, his bony knees rattling as they touch the floor.
“One, two, three..” he counts, all the way to ten, the boys immediately around him pointing and laughing at the victim, who grins as he gets up, deterred only for a short time before a pencil finds itself airborne again.
“Who is listening?” I ask, copying the rise in Mr. Cho’s voice, hoping it has some magic in its tone.
“You’re a tool!” a voice echoes from the back. But their English isn’t quite that good, yet, and besides I know it came from that small part of me that analyzes the stupid things I say after I say them — I’ll copy you, Is this half n half?
A few are listening, I know which ones because their heads are faced forward and they aren’t laughing hysterically. I love them. They are my favorite. They can be in my class anytime they want. The rest I will throw words at until I lose my voice or they begin to heed my presence out of pity.
A bell rings in the hallway and the class leader shouts: “Stand up, plrease!”
“Gooood Afteeeernooooon Teeeeechaaassssss. Thaaaaank yooooou and seeee yooou laaaataaaa.”
A chorus of angels, I tell you.
As we leave, Cho smiles and hands me the blue marker he was writing with. “Next class you can write, and I will deal with them.”
“Okey Dokey.”
