Unadulterated loathing
Oct. 20th, 2014 05:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanSo I have reached a milestone in my career as a teacher: the first time I hated a student.
A bunch of my friends have heard about this student, because I had to spend fifteen hours a week with him for WEEKS and he was... dramatically, astonishingly awful. I’d come in every day after class and complain about him to my colleagues, and when I tried not to because I didn’t want to be boring, they'd ask because his horribleness was entertaining in its sheer scale.
I’m sure I’ve missed some things even in this epic post.
The worst part was that I didn’t want to chuck him out (though the Director of Studies made it clear I could at my discretion) because he was my guarantee of full-time hours until Christmas. Now I don’t have that because he's been chucked out. But I feel ZERO regret.
Well, the first thing is the thing that got him suspended this last week (and will 100% get him expelled and should have got him arrested, but the boss didn’t listen to me or the Director of Studies): stalking. There was a nineteen-year-old Saudi girl in one of the other classes he was smarming at - the first we heard was when her husband turned up furious and threatening to kill Dickhead over some alleged affair. I was mostly worried about the girl, but it turns out the husband actually knew she had zero interest in Dickhead, thank goodness. Because Dickhead kept being creepy in this awful, plausibly deniable way - showing up at the door of her classroom every day to smile and wave, walking behind her to the loos - until the husband came back, furious again, and she reported it, shaking like a leaf. Dickhead was immediately suspended, thank goodness.
That was the worst example of his general dickishness but there are SO MANY MORE.
His issues with women showed up in a million other ways. His first class with me was him and another guy - he said “where are the girls? Bring us girls.” I mentioned being a Liverpool fan and he immediately told me to name five Liverpool players. (Fake football fan girls!) As the weeks drew on, he started muttering under his breath in Greek if I asked him a question, and generally had the attitude of a fifteen-year-old calling his maths teacher a bitch. During an activity where the students were meant to predict their lives ten years from now, he said he wanted to be on a yacht with six or seven girls - “dancers”. He was also ENORMOUSLY CREEPY to our receptionist. (I told him off a lot when I found out about this, because I really like her and he was horrific.) Like, he came up to her and kept speaking in Greek; she asked him to stop, visibly uncomfortable, and he read her name off her badge and started looking through her Facebook on his phone in front of her. Uggggh.
The way he treated the admin staff was awful in general, the worst stereotype of a spoilt nineteen-year-old from a small town who’s never had to work. He put them through an enormous amount of trouble, because he left three separate homestay families, declaring them “disgusting”. (Ten-to-one for racist reasons - he also declared a Bengali student smelled. Thankfully after the student had left.) He also expected them to CARRY HIS BAGS, and the big boss came out at that and shouted at him about the staff not being his porters. Dickhead didn’t get the hint. He considered the teachers to be at his disposal too - one of them is Greek, and despite having an all right standard of English himself, Dickhead demanded the teacher give up half his lunch break to translate.
He came in to class scowling a couple of weeks ago and told me one of the other admin staff had been rude. I asked him how, and Dickhead said the guy in question been glaring and looked like he wanted to beat him up. (Well, he didn’t say exactly that because his English wasn’t good enough, but it’s what he meant.) On further questioning, it turned out the admin dude had politely asked him to leave the reception area because he couldn’t be there, and told him to go to class. Dickhead had Skyped a friend. Then the admin guy had come out and glaringly told him again to go to class.
Dickhead told me this in injured tones, not seeming to clock that he had just explained he was asked to leave reception and sat there on Skype instead. I told him that HE was the one who’d been rude. Dickhead responded that “what he has to understand is that he’s not the boss of me”. I told him NOPE, he did what the admin staff told him, every single fucking time. At which point he was all “oh, I didn’t know this rule” like USUALLY that would be acceptable behaviour. Poisonous little snob.
I had another student about his age. That student was constantly exhausted because he was working full-time to support his eleven hours of study a week. And though he was friendly, he was clearly extremely pissed off by the end by this bloke with all the opportunity in the world that he couldn’t be bothered to take advantage of.
At one point aforementioned Bengali student got out an iPhone, and Dickhead started being all “I’m poor, I’m poor” while he sat in his Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister threads. Wanker. I pointed this out in a jokey way, and he was like “they’re fake” but then felt the need to add “they’re not, they’re real”.
He said a bunch of horrifically racist stuff; Bengali people are dirty, most of them are bad people, they don’t wear shoes in the street (???? I work five minutes from Brick Lane, he can SEE THIS BEING UNTRUE every single day, but racism is illogical) etc. He wants to go and live in America (specifically New York - I mean he didn’t specify but the way he talked he obviously was thinking of a New York type city). More than once he asked if he’d always be an immigrant if he moved to America. I said yes, because he might become a citizen, but he’d always be Greek. Which I sort of thought is a good thing but he looked unhappy, so I said that immigrant isn’t an insult, doesn’t always have bad connotations. At which point he said no, because at home “we beat up immigrants”.
If he wasn’t way too apathetic to have ever voted, this kid was a Golden Dawn type down to his overpriced trainers.
He also pulled the “just my opinion” shit with me which I despise in all contexts, and I made it really clear that it wasn’t going to fly with me. You don’t get to say “it’s just my opinion” about thinking Bengali people are dirty like it’s just as valid as NOT being a racist shitbag - you’re just wrong, like if you said 2 and 2 is 3. (Which is exactly what I said to him.) He also did this when I gave him feedback about how to improve his speaking score - which, no, you don’t get to play it off like everybody has an opinion and they’re all equal when I am your English teacher and the subject is how to pass English exams.
He was taking an exam class, which means weekly practice tests. He was unhappy with the results every week, and clearly decided at some point that I was being mean and unfair. (I wasn’t, although he’s the first student to ever make me pleased when he fucked up.) Every fucking time he got a test back he’d sit and go “I’m not happy, I’m not happy” instead of listening to me while I gave him feedback on ways to improve.
The nadir of this was when I said, “what do you want me to do?” He very visibly weighed up accusing me outright of being unfair to him, and instead chose to offer me a bribe to change his answers and get him a better score.
Not to be precious about it, but I was genuinely REALLY offended by the slur on my professional ethics. Like I would EVER fucking do that. It was also ridiculous - these were practice tests with absolutely no import other than the chance to practice the format and get feedback. But he just couldn’t handle getting a 3.
His attitude to correction was similarly abysmal. I have some sympathy for being irritated by correction when you’re speaking even when you know it’s helpful and part of class - I’ve not really had a student who took that attitude, even the high-level ones where it’s really minor points of emphasis I’m correcting, but I’d get it. But he was… he REPEATEDLY asked “why you correct me” or pointed out in aggrieved tones that I’d corrected him five times that day. The other students clearly found this as ridiculous as I did though I tried to make sure they didn’t snark on him in class. But seriously. I was just like LITERALLY MY JOB and didn’t even engage with the not-very-subtextual “you are just being MEAN to me”. Except then he kept pushing, so I asked, “did your English teacher in Greece not correct you?”
“No.”
“That’s probably why you got a 2.”
One of the other students, who was new, actually gasped and I immediately felt bad about my snark. I generally go for ‘friendly and approachable’ as my classroom persona and consistency is important, even leaving aside the question of whether it’s cool to snark on your students in the absence of a friendly, teasing rapport. But I was sorely provoked.
He wouldn’t engage or take on board any of my corrections, which is why six weeks in, after making the same complaint MORE than weekly, he was still saying “all the time I take the same points” instead of “get the same mark”. He alternated not listening with testing me (“mosquito, you know what this is?”) and ‘correcting’ me (“yes, two Os” when I wrote ‘loose’ on the board). He constantly asked “how you know that” if I showed the classical education of a monkey (yes I fucking know who Socrates is, pipe down). He had this habit of giving loud,. flat “NO”s any time you said something he disagreed with or didn’t know; I walked in on him doing this to a Malaysian student on the subject of whether Malaysia is a Muslim country.
This last was probably not unrelated to his Islamophobia -- he responded to hearing another student was Muslim by cringing away, and when a female Muslim student politely declined to shake another male student’s hand for likely-religious reasons, Dickhead had a meltdown about how rude she was. The student whose handshake had been refused wasn’t bothered.
The most irritating part was probably how he seemed to feel constantly injured by the world; he went around contantly shaking his head at how unfair everyone was. (That slow headshake and his habit of slowly smoothing down his hair in class are such classic teeth-gritting moves from spoilt teenage boys. Ugggggh.) He told me “grammar isn’t important” when I corrected his grammar, even when I was explaining that I HADN’T UNDERSTOOD THE POINT HIS ESSAY WAS MAKING because the grammar was so tangled. And as part of his general persecution complex he got all annoyed and told me “my grammar is bad but my articulation is good and you know it”. No, I don’t actually, because “articulation” IS THE WRONG WORD.
I AM SO GLAD I NEVER HAVE TO TEACH THE LITTLE FUCKER AGAIN. SO. GLAD.
A bunch of my friends have heard about this student, because I had to spend fifteen hours a week with him for WEEKS and he was... dramatically, astonishingly awful. I’d come in every day after class and complain about him to my colleagues, and when I tried not to because I didn’t want to be boring, they'd ask because his horribleness was entertaining in its sheer scale.
I’m sure I’ve missed some things even in this epic post.
The worst part was that I didn’t want to chuck him out (though the Director of Studies made it clear I could at my discretion) because he was my guarantee of full-time hours until Christmas. Now I don’t have that because he's been chucked out. But I feel ZERO regret.
Well, the first thing is the thing that got him suspended this last week (and will 100% get him expelled and should have got him arrested, but the boss didn’t listen to me or the Director of Studies): stalking. There was a nineteen-year-old Saudi girl in one of the other classes he was smarming at - the first we heard was when her husband turned up furious and threatening to kill Dickhead over some alleged affair. I was mostly worried about the girl, but it turns out the husband actually knew she had zero interest in Dickhead, thank goodness. Because Dickhead kept being creepy in this awful, plausibly deniable way - showing up at the door of her classroom every day to smile and wave, walking behind her to the loos - until the husband came back, furious again, and she reported it, shaking like a leaf. Dickhead was immediately suspended, thank goodness.
That was the worst example of his general dickishness but there are SO MANY MORE.
His issues with women showed up in a million other ways. His first class with me was him and another guy - he said “where are the girls? Bring us girls.” I mentioned being a Liverpool fan and he immediately told me to name five Liverpool players. (Fake football fan girls!) As the weeks drew on, he started muttering under his breath in Greek if I asked him a question, and generally had the attitude of a fifteen-year-old calling his maths teacher a bitch. During an activity where the students were meant to predict their lives ten years from now, he said he wanted to be on a yacht with six or seven girls - “dancers”. He was also ENORMOUSLY CREEPY to our receptionist. (I told him off a lot when I found out about this, because I really like her and he was horrific.) Like, he came up to her and kept speaking in Greek; she asked him to stop, visibly uncomfortable, and he read her name off her badge and started looking through her Facebook on his phone in front of her. Uggggh.
The way he treated the admin staff was awful in general, the worst stereotype of a spoilt nineteen-year-old from a small town who’s never had to work. He put them through an enormous amount of trouble, because he left three separate homestay families, declaring them “disgusting”. (Ten-to-one for racist reasons - he also declared a Bengali student smelled. Thankfully after the student had left.) He also expected them to CARRY HIS BAGS, and the big boss came out at that and shouted at him about the staff not being his porters. Dickhead didn’t get the hint. He considered the teachers to be at his disposal too - one of them is Greek, and despite having an all right standard of English himself, Dickhead demanded the teacher give up half his lunch break to translate.
He came in to class scowling a couple of weeks ago and told me one of the other admin staff had been rude. I asked him how, and Dickhead said the guy in question been glaring and looked like he wanted to beat him up. (Well, he didn’t say exactly that because his English wasn’t good enough, but it’s what he meant.) On further questioning, it turned out the admin dude had politely asked him to leave the reception area because he couldn’t be there, and told him to go to class. Dickhead had Skyped a friend. Then the admin guy had come out and glaringly told him again to go to class.
Dickhead told me this in injured tones, not seeming to clock that he had just explained he was asked to leave reception and sat there on Skype instead. I told him that HE was the one who’d been rude. Dickhead responded that “what he has to understand is that he’s not the boss of me”. I told him NOPE, he did what the admin staff told him, every single fucking time. At which point he was all “oh, I didn’t know this rule” like USUALLY that would be acceptable behaviour. Poisonous little snob.
I had another student about his age. That student was constantly exhausted because he was working full-time to support his eleven hours of study a week. And though he was friendly, he was clearly extremely pissed off by the end by this bloke with all the opportunity in the world that he couldn’t be bothered to take advantage of.
At one point aforementioned Bengali student got out an iPhone, and Dickhead started being all “I’m poor, I’m poor” while he sat in his Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister threads. Wanker. I pointed this out in a jokey way, and he was like “they’re fake” but then felt the need to add “they’re not, they’re real”.
He said a bunch of horrifically racist stuff; Bengali people are dirty, most of them are bad people, they don’t wear shoes in the street (???? I work five minutes from Brick Lane, he can SEE THIS BEING UNTRUE every single day, but racism is illogical) etc. He wants to go and live in America (specifically New York - I mean he didn’t specify but the way he talked he obviously was thinking of a New York type city). More than once he asked if he’d always be an immigrant if he moved to America. I said yes, because he might become a citizen, but he’d always be Greek. Which I sort of thought is a good thing but he looked unhappy, so I said that immigrant isn’t an insult, doesn’t always have bad connotations. At which point he said no, because at home “we beat up immigrants”.
If he wasn’t way too apathetic to have ever voted, this kid was a Golden Dawn type down to his overpriced trainers.
He also pulled the “just my opinion” shit with me which I despise in all contexts, and I made it really clear that it wasn’t going to fly with me. You don’t get to say “it’s just my opinion” about thinking Bengali people are dirty like it’s just as valid as NOT being a racist shitbag - you’re just wrong, like if you said 2 and 2 is 3. (Which is exactly what I said to him.) He also did this when I gave him feedback about how to improve his speaking score - which, no, you don’t get to play it off like everybody has an opinion and they’re all equal when I am your English teacher and the subject is how to pass English exams.
He was taking an exam class, which means weekly practice tests. He was unhappy with the results every week, and clearly decided at some point that I was being mean and unfair. (I wasn’t, although he’s the first student to ever make me pleased when he fucked up.) Every fucking time he got a test back he’d sit and go “I’m not happy, I’m not happy” instead of listening to me while I gave him feedback on ways to improve.
The nadir of this was when I said, “what do you want me to do?” He very visibly weighed up accusing me outright of being unfair to him, and instead chose to offer me a bribe to change his answers and get him a better score.
Not to be precious about it, but I was genuinely REALLY offended by the slur on my professional ethics. Like I would EVER fucking do that. It was also ridiculous - these were practice tests with absolutely no import other than the chance to practice the format and get feedback. But he just couldn’t handle getting a 3.
His attitude to correction was similarly abysmal. I have some sympathy for being irritated by correction when you’re speaking even when you know it’s helpful and part of class - I’ve not really had a student who took that attitude, even the high-level ones where it’s really minor points of emphasis I’m correcting, but I’d get it. But he was… he REPEATEDLY asked “why you correct me” or pointed out in aggrieved tones that I’d corrected him five times that day. The other students clearly found this as ridiculous as I did though I tried to make sure they didn’t snark on him in class. But seriously. I was just like LITERALLY MY JOB and didn’t even engage with the not-very-subtextual “you are just being MEAN to me”. Except then he kept pushing, so I asked, “did your English teacher in Greece not correct you?”
“No.”
“That’s probably why you got a 2.”
One of the other students, who was new, actually gasped and I immediately felt bad about my snark. I generally go for ‘friendly and approachable’ as my classroom persona and consistency is important, even leaving aside the question of whether it’s cool to snark on your students in the absence of a friendly, teasing rapport. But I was sorely provoked.
He wouldn’t engage or take on board any of my corrections, which is why six weeks in, after making the same complaint MORE than weekly, he was still saying “all the time I take the same points” instead of “get the same mark”. He alternated not listening with testing me (“mosquito, you know what this is?”) and ‘correcting’ me (“yes, two Os” when I wrote ‘loose’ on the board). He constantly asked “how you know that” if I showed the classical education of a monkey (yes I fucking know who Socrates is, pipe down). He had this habit of giving loud,. flat “NO”s any time you said something he disagreed with or didn’t know; I walked in on him doing this to a Malaysian student on the subject of whether Malaysia is a Muslim country.
This last was probably not unrelated to his Islamophobia -- he responded to hearing another student was Muslim by cringing away, and when a female Muslim student politely declined to shake another male student’s hand for likely-religious reasons, Dickhead had a meltdown about how rude she was. The student whose handshake had been refused wasn’t bothered.
The most irritating part was probably how he seemed to feel constantly injured by the world; he went around contantly shaking his head at how unfair everyone was. (That slow headshake and his habit of slowly smoothing down his hair in class are such classic teeth-gritting moves from spoilt teenage boys. Ugggggh.) He told me “grammar isn’t important” when I corrected his grammar, even when I was explaining that I HADN’T UNDERSTOOD THE POINT HIS ESSAY WAS MAKING because the grammar was so tangled. And as part of his general persecution complex he got all annoyed and told me “my grammar is bad but my articulation is good and you know it”. No, I don’t actually, because “articulation” IS THE WRONG WORD.
I AM SO GLAD I NEVER HAVE TO TEACH THE LITTLE FUCKER AGAIN. SO. GLAD.
