Humping y Joto

Almost three months passed before I heard anything out of Carlos. He would sit at his desk and listen, or not listen, work, or not work. I didn't call on him in class because I feared language acquisition might be a cause for his taciturnity. A better teacher probably would have found a way to meet with Carlos one-on-one at some point during that three-month stretch. I think the fact that I've started a blog for the sole intention of publicly ridiculing my students is proof enough that I am not a better teacher.

So anyway, three months--half of August, September, October, half of November. Nothing. Not a word. Then we began a vocabulary unit on homonyms. Those are words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings (ex., affect/effect, elicit/illicit, compliment/complement, etc.). Or maybe they're homophones; I've never been real sure of the difference. The important thing is that none of the kids questioned me on this conundrum, and that's really what matters most--maintaining a perception of competence.

I gave the students an assignment in which they had to take a homonym pair and do the following things: 1) write an original sentence properly using both homonyms (for some reason teachers think that boldface italics create some sort of desired emphasis), 2) devise (come up with) a mnemonic device (memory trick) that will aid you and others in distinguishing (telling the difference) between the two (yes, I do have to define everything), and 3) find a picture, either from a magazine or the internets (none of them get that allusion (reference)), that goes along with your homonym pair. They were to complete the assignment on a computer sheet of paper (Is there a better name than "computer sheet of paper"? I feel like an idiot when I say that, but I don't know any other thing to call it.) so that they could show their memory tricks to the other students with the use of a nifty device called a document camera. It projects whatever is placed beneath it on to the big screen. (This explanation of the document camera was probably superfluous. They're new to me, but I'm sure most adults with "real" jobs have been using them for years.) This way the students would essentially be teaching their words to the class. I think it's called "peer instruction"; it's a pretty advanced teaching method. Of course, you're probably already starting to see the flaw in this approach. I saw it too, and I knew it would happen sooner or later. I just didn't expect it to come from quiet little Carlos.

The first and only thing I and the other students saw was the above picture, which was probably the first and only thing you saw after opening this page. I knew I had a responsibility to maintain an air of professionalism and maturity, but I couldn't. All at once, before I even had a hope of stopping it, all my pent up juvenile lewdness escaped in one tremendous guffaw. I laughed my ass off. I laughed harder and longer than any of the students--till the tears came streaming down my face. Two solid minutes I laughed. Finally, once I regained the ability to speak, I asked Carlos what homonym that particular picture was supposed to be demonstrating. After three months, like a monk finally breaking his vow of silence, with a simple utterance of vocal ejaculation, all heads craning forward, thirsting for some transcendent vociferation from this modern-day prophet of gloom, I heard a word from Carlos: "meddle."

And that word was the proverbial cleft in the dike. (Not that kind of dike, Linsey.) Now, I can’t get the kid to shut up. He’s constantly blathering his personal take on passages of literature, offering up to the gods of written word his holy exegesis of these sacred texts. The only problem—he’s convinced that every character of every story is either a junkie, a lesbian (yes, that kind of lesbian, Linsey), or a midget. We recently read a Kate Chopin story entitled “Silk Stockings” about a woman (“little Mrs. Sommers”) who finds herself the unexpected owner of fifteen dollars, heads to the stores with the intention of buying new clothes for her children, but instead buys all manner of extravagances for herself, showing just the slightest of blushes when the girl behind the counter asks her if she would like to see their selection of silk hosiery. Carlos posited that Mrs. Sommers was a dwarfed, lesbian prostitute.

Recently I had the kids write a personal narrative about a time when they stood up for something they felt was right. The prompt seems innocent enough, but you’d be impressed with how easily sixteen year olds can foul up even the most innocent things. Over the past 2-3 weeks, I’ve read approximately 157 essays dealing with drugs, alcohol, sex, cheating (both of the classroom and the bedroom backseat variety), bullying, fighting, trespassing, dress code infringements, animal rescue attempts, and white-trash Christmases (okay, only one of those).

Carlos chose to write about the day he came across his friend getting beat up by a couple of pink-haired goth punks. Maybe only one of them had pink hair. I had told Carlos to try and include good voice (this is what English teachers call emotion in writing…sort of). So in his rough draft, when describing one of the goth punks, the pink-haired one I think, he used every high school boy’s favorite pejorative: fag. In the margin, I first complimented him on his great attempt at voice, and then I suggested that he find a different, less offensive word. I read Carlos’s final draft last night. Among the many changes he had made, I noticed that the word “fag” was now replaced with the word “joto.” I knew it was Spanish, but I didn’t know what it meant. Instinctively, I typed the word into Google. Somewhere in the .21 seconds it took for Google to seek out all 693,000 instances of the word “joto”on the World Wide Web, I realized I didn’t need to look up the word “joto.” I knew what the word “joto” meant. And so do you. It doesn’t mean quiet; not anymore.