Classroom Shenanigans

At the end of last week, a dozen teenage students asked me to teach them how to write a cover letter to send when applying for a job. So I started teaching them how to do so. First I wrote an outline of the letter, with a general description of its structure. At one point, a few girls got up and left the room, then re-entered after not too long. When I finished laying out the structure on the dry erase board, I turned around to get the eraser so I could erase the structure and go through an actual example with them. The eraser was gone. I kept asking where the eraser was. Finally one of them got up and retrieved it outside where they had hid it.

I then started going through the specific example letter, with specific (though fictional) addresses and people, and an imaginary job mentioned in it. At one point, I had to change something I had written on the board. I again turned around to get the eraser, and again found that it was gone. I was both irritated with the students, as well as with myself for placing it behind me again after the first time they had hid it. I let myself get angry enough so that they could see the anger on my face, but I didn't yell at them. One of them told me not to get angry, then soon thereafter the eraser was returned to me. For the rest of the lesson, I kept the eraser on the board in front of me, avoiding any further shenanigans.

Last night I was teaching an English class with a much larger group of students, mostly about food and mealtimes. I used the opportunity to teach them that people in the USA often eat lunch and dinner earlier than many Moroccans do. (Moroccans tend to eat lunch between 1:30p.m. and 3:00p.m., and sometimes later than that! They tend to eat dinner after 8:30p.m., and sometimes after 10:00p.m.!)

Anyway, the classroom was nearly full; I think that there were nearly 30 students in the room. Soon after I got started, more students were coming into the room. I had to keep stopping the lesson because the new arrivals were distracting the students who were already in the room. Finally a couple of students came in with a couple of chairs, and were trying to shove their way to some free space near the front of the room. I concluded that I had to stop the distracting and disruptive interruptions. Although I wasn't actually as irritated as I probably appeared to be, I bodily removed the two students who were trying to shove their way to the front of the room. For the rest of the class, the rest of the students who were left in the room behaved much better than Moroccan students usually behave when I teach...