One of the funnier challenges educators face is keeping a straight face when a student says something inappropriate. Yep, it’s pretty damn hard having to reprimand them, despite laughing uncontrollably on the inside.
For example:
- It was the end of the day and a student put on a helmet, to ride home. Another student walked up to him and hit him over the head. When I asked her why she did that she replied, “Because he has a helmet on and can’t feel it”. I had to compose myself before telling her it wasn’t OK to hit anyone, even if they had head protection.
- A student in my class revealed to me that when he sings the Australian National Anthem at assemblies, he sings “wealth for Doyle” in stead of “wealth for toil” (his surname was Doyle). He told me to stop laughing as I was telling him off and every time we had assembly after that I had to make sure I was standing no where near him. We always exchanged a little look as I knew exactly what he was doing.
- A boy in my class kindly offered to scrub clean our classroom tables for me before school started. He had not been working long before he stopped, looked at the stubborn, sticky, glue marks, and said, ‘Now, how the f*ck do I get this sh*t off?’
- On yard duty, a student came up to me and reported that someone had said something bad. So I asked the student what he had said. He shrugged, looked sheepish and stated, ‘I just said cows have big boobies. Well…they do!”
- During a phonics lesson we were brainstorming words that contain the “f” phoneme (sound) and I was writing them up on the board. Students enthusiastically provided me with farm, phone, frog, flat etc. until one little girl, who never usually contributed, began waving her hand madly to offer up a word. Impressed, I called on her and she said, “F*ck!” Shocked, I replied, “I beg your pardon”. So…she said it again.
- One morning during writing, a student asked me for help with some spelling. He said the word a number of times, but I still couldn’t work out what the word was. When I asked him to use it in a sentence, he looked at me like I was daft and said, “You know. Smorning. Smorning I got up and came to school.”
Sometimes it’s hard to remain unfazed on the outside!
By Sarah 
Good one, Sarah! 🙂
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