A Tip of the Slung

I'm sorry this post has been so long in coming (that's what she said), and I apologize in advance that it won't have been worth the wait. Eventually this blog will again supply its readers (all 8 of you) with the anecdotal quality it possessed in its infancy. Until then, read this:

I don’t know how it is in other jobs; I almost can’t remember ever having any other job. But I have a vague recollection of once being able to speak like a normal human being. I could string together words into complete sentences almost without having to try. And I think I remember being pretty good at it. I could say exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and the other person would leave the conversation understanding exactly what I wanted them to understand. I took effective communication for granted. I don’t do that anymore—because for teachers, effective communication is a luxury, something that only happens when the fates allow or the stars align or you get a good night’s sleep.

Part of the problem is trying to work with a clientele that is flawed by default. We all know how stupid teenagers are and how stupidity has a way of rubbing off on others. But I can’t blame everything on the students. Even in those rare occasions when they are listening attentively (especially at these times it seems) I still have difficulty conversing. I find that my tongue’s main assailants are the Freudian slip (saying one thing and meaning your mother) and the spoonerism (tangling the beginning sounds of words—“it is kisstomary to cuss the bride”) and other such malapropisms. And the worst part is, these slips are typically sexual in nature. I can’t explain why that is. Maybe the tongue just gets tired of continual repression and self-censorship and, like a cork from a bottle of champagne, it just pops.

I was afraid at first that I had some strange perversion that was causing these sexual slips, but I’ve since talked to other teachers and found that I am not alone. Sometimes the slips are explainable. Like the time the usually verbally chaste teacher was one day hit by the Huck Finn bug. (That’s a spoonerism you sort of have to concede at least once when teaching Twain.) Sometimes the slips are unexplainable. Like the time another teacher inexplicably blurted out a slang for the female reproductive tract. (I won’t say the word here, but it rhymes with shunt.) Sometimes the slips are perhaps a product of some subconscious desire. Like the time the screenwriting teacher was leading her class in one of those “Who am I?” games where everyone wore a card with a different movie title on their foreheads and had to go around asking questions of others in an attempt to determine which movie they were, so she starts off with, “Is Brad Pitt in me?” And sometimes the slips are hopefully not a product of some subconscious desire. Like the time a student’s cell phone went off in his pocket with the ringtone of some booty-bumpin’ jam and I said, “Sounds like you got a party in your pants.”

Recently, I was going over a grammar review with my classes. Our main focus was the common uses of the comma. I was going through it pretty quickly because a) it was pretty easy stuff that they should have known since the 6^th grade, b) students’ eyes tend to glaze over if you take too much time with something like punctuation, and c) as usual, I was trying to squeeze 30 minutes too much into the lesson plan. About halfway through the review, we got to this sentence: “She was a pretty good cook, but her mother-in-law will always be better.” The common use of the comma here obviously being to separate two independent clauses with the help of a conjunction. So while reading it aloud, I felt it necessary to say the word “comma”: “She was a pretty good cook (COMMA) but her mother-in-law will always be better.” A completely innocent sentence, right? Unless you read it so fast that you get the words cook and comma tangled. Then it takes on a whole new meaning, albeit one that doesn’t make sense anatomically.

But my first, and probably best, sexual slip of the tongue happened on my first day of teaching. There was this kid named Frank. Right off I knew he was a weird kid: around his neck he wore a twine necklace with a rattlesnake head pendant. Yes, a real snake head—forked tongue and fangs and all. And this was my first class of my first day. I wasn’t sure if I should be missing my construction job yet. Well, as is often the case on the first day of school, students’ schedules were changed around, and so was Frank’s. So I had the pleasure of seeing Snake-boy twice that day. And because he had already heard all the first day rigmarole, while I was getting the other students rigmaroled, I told Frank he could just sit there and play with his snake.

And that’s the difference between teaching and other jobs. It’s not that other jobs are free of sexual commentary. Certainly not. It’s that the sexual commentary is on purpose. But in teaching, it’s always an unintended and embarrassing catastrophe. We try to play it off, but the kids know better. After all, if teenagers know anything it’s sexual banter.