Higher Ground (Teachers Keep On Teachin')

I love my job because each day scholars in the school of life trust me, their sensei, to connect with them on a spiritual and mental level at a small point on their endless journey to enlightenment.

I'm just kidding.

I love the sound of my own voice. That's why I'm a teacher.

My new job is like my old job in that I teach English. However, my new students are like my old students in no way at all.

My old students kept entire hoofed legs on their kitchen counters, drank beer all day and wiped their butts with toilet paper.

My new students don't eat pork or drink alcohol, but they do wipe their butts with their hands.

I love this. I think it's great. My preferred spice of life is interacting with different people from different cultures all the live long day. Why? I have no idea.

What I do know is that 24 people depend on my help to get to Level 3 of a 7 level program. I also know that 23 of those people are from Saudi Arabia, and 2 of those people are women. We'll get to the 1 person who's unaccounted for.

I want to start by saying that I adore my students before I shred them. I value them for who they are and where they come from. They teach me an awful lot more than I teach them.

And here we go...

What in the fuck is going on in Saudi Arabia right now? I tried to prepare myself, but egads, guys. E...gads.

I'm not arrogant enough to think that I can compete with twenty-five years of being told it's this way when I think it's that way, but I am arrogant enough to think that I can prepare these adults for a bachelor's or master's program in the United States despite the fact that they're not giving much to work with.

For starters, I've warned them not to cover their male friends or new acquaintances with kisses...especially on the nose. They just wouldn't believe me despite my threats of public humiliation or much worse. We role played, I professed my love for the kiss in spite of my culture, we hypotheticaled ourselves silly until I said, "It would be like if I had a problem with my right hand, so I went to shake your left hand instead of your right" (ensuing pandemonium).

And no, I cannot just change your grade. I know that I can, like, open the gradebook and erase a grade, and like, put a better grade there, but like really I can't. This is considered a serious question.

The phone goes in your bag or in my hand. It does not go in your pocket. No, it doesn't go in your other pocket, and it sure as hell doesn't go in your face when I'm lecturing. It goes in your asshole. 

Dating. I don't want to talk to you about it either, but this chapter is on dating because the ESL gods hate me. Yes, I have ex-boyfriends. Yes, that's okay in my culture. I'm serious! No, you don't have to marry the first person you go on a date with freaking thankfully. You can date more than one person at a time if you want to. I know dating is forbidden. You don't have to do it, but I did notice that you cut all the pictures of women out of our book. Gross. 

I hate that I have to sit across from a grown man for forty minutes with unbroken eye contact because he can't not cheat or write on the tables.

I also hate that I have to say everything ten times (this is not an exaggeration), and they still do the exact opposite of what I say. 

But what I hate the most is that during an I agree/disagree exercise, they all looked straight at my face and told me that yes of course men are smarter than women. The only person who disagreed was the one person who is a woman and VIETNAMESE in the class. She also has by far the best grade, though her vagina makes her the dumbest person in the room (except for me cause she's Asian).

My job is really hard, and that's okay because I need a hard job to keep my mind from imploding.

But my job is really easy when I forget my lunch and multiple students bring me theirs. It's also really easy when I bring the most unpopular guy in class a week old cookie from the teachers' workroom for his birthday and catch him taking a picture of it on his phone. It's easy when they remember my own birthday and sing to me. And it's really, really easy when we make each other laugh, as we do every day.

So, I'll teach a woman in a burqa even though I really want to see her face, and I'll teach a man who thinks I'm inferior to him. I'll even do it in a green snake skin skirt wearing heels and a v-neck blouse while constantly tucking my uncovered hair behind my ears. Because if they can come sit and listen to a godless slut all day, this godless slut can at least listen to them.

Not so much here...

or here...

but riiiiiiight here.