I Said "Fuck"

Major cities all over the country have embraced what critics call a “surveillance society.” Cameras that can turn corners, operate in symphony with hundreds of other cameras, and feed video directly to any source properly connected to the system… cameras so powerful they can follow you, average citizen, down city streets and see exactly what you might happen to be reading, right down to “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” or, if you’re like me, “Dear Penthouse.” Major cities. Cities as liberal and anti-fascist as San Francisco have implemented this billion-dollar system of monitoring everyday folks under the guise of safety.

So knowing this, it should be of no surprise to find out that administrators are listening in on my classroom. You all remember those little wood-box speakers mounted near the ceiling of every room, a laughably ancient technology compared to what these major cities are using, but just as effective. As with almost every technology, the flaw is user-related. It was by user-error that I came to suspect someone was spying on me. I heard a bell-tone that usually means someone from the office wants to say something to me or the school. “Hello,” I said. No answer. It happened again. “Hello?” No answer. Then I heard a quick succession of two unfamiliar beeps, what I now assume to have been the equivalent of a mute button.

Now I’m a pretty paranoid person as is, but it wasn’t long before I said something to another teacher about the strange PA noises, and it wasn’t long before my suspicions were conformed. Oddly enough, this teacher did overhear something about administrators listening in on my class. Why would they do that? I wondered. Something about how I might be cursing.

Cursing? Me? No! … well, yes actually. Quite a bit. Like a sailor. But who gives a fuck? Apparently the administration give several, several fucks, that is.

This leads me to the title of this post, which is the title of an entry with which I wanted to kick off the blog, following my introductory post. But things did not work out that way, so allow me now to set the scene.

It is the third day of school. I am still not used to the fact that there exist students who cannot remember what happened two seconds ago, who cannot sit still, who cannot keep their hands to themselves, who cannot stop talking, who have anger issues, who have deep-seeded sexual issues, students who speak in an unintelligible slang, students who will say whatever they want to a teacher, students with no vocabulary, students who answer rhetorical questions, students who are generally a bunch of assholes. I’m having enough trouble already trying to figure out how to make lesson plans, what to teach, how to teach it, etc. I’m having enough trouble being tested every which way by questions that I’m too clouded to realize are solely designed to test me, and when I try to answer them, being clouded, everything seeming very unreal, I am not conscious of the fact that the student isn’t actually looking for answer, but rather looking to see if I would actually be dumb enough to answer. All I’m asking of them, in calm, polite words, is that they stay seated a not talk while I try to go over the lesson—which I’m extremely self-conscious about considering I received nil guidance.

Anyhow, one thing leads to another, as the song says, and the next thing you know I am yelling at them to quiet down. They do not like yelling and it does not make them any quieter, even though the first thing I yelled was, “Quiet please!” I probably repeated myself three times before moving on to criticizing the students (not in a mean way) about not being able to follow simple directions, about how everything has fallen apart since the first day when we had that pep talk about respect, and about how everything was going to be easy-going and no one would get in trouble because there are only a few very basic rules to follow in this class… this whole spiel—students yapping back the whole time—ended, or I should say paused, in me yelling, “Why can’t you just fucking listen!”

Well, that was it. I said “fuck” and it was only the third day of school. I knew then I had to reevaulate my method. I knew this as soon as I said it. And I knew it before the note from the principal showed up in my box the next day: “Please see me re some comments you may or may not have made.”

The first emotion I felt was anger. Not at myself or the principal, but at my students, who, if recorded for one fifty-minute class period, would be captured saying the nastiest, most disgusting, most racist shit you’ve heard in a long time. A lot of it comes from the hyper-sexualized rap and R&B they listen to (“I pop in the nudie tape: bitch! I love the way the booty shake: bitch!”), and the rest of it comes from their backwards home lives (try to guess how many homes I pass on the way to school that proudly fly the flag of the Confederacy). Hypocrites! is basically what I thought.

But I knew the principal better than other new teachers. I met him the first day of pre-planning and we talked about literature and history. He really did put the “pal” in his title. Of course I was uncomfortable, but he was a good sport about it.

After a game of adolescent telephone, he heard that I had called the class “stupid fucking kids,” which, without a doubt, they certainly are. “But,” I explained, “I said no such thing… I said ‘fuck,’ sure, but the phrasing was more like ‘Why can’t you fucking listen?’” I had no problem admitting this, nor did I feel the need to bend the truth into some far-fetched story about teaching a lesson on “learning interrogative sentences through swear words” (it’s research-based!). I didn’t need to do anything like that because the principal had never seen anything like these kids either. He understood where a young guy like myself was coming from. The whole thing amounted to “don’t do it again, obviously” and the conversation quickly moved on to beer, literature, and the hardships of trying to impose middle-class enlightenment values on a bunch of kids who “can’t fucking listen,” to quote the principal.

So why is it, five weeks after the third day of school, administrators are still listening in? Okay, I suppose I have not washed my mouth out with soap completely. The other day I said “hell.” “Oooooooo” was the response I received from my bad class. This was after they would not be quiet and an administrator had to be called to come in and calm things down, only do be talked back to just the same (this was the third time this happened). So they’re all screaming and yelling unintelllgible bullshit at me and complaining about being punished for this or that, and all I said was “What the hell do you want me to do?” They say, “Ooooooo,” as if I did something horrible, as if one of them didn’t just make a reference to wiping the splooge off of his ho’s stomach (not kidding). They are intent on setting a double standard for foul language, but I have a plan.

All my plan requires is for me not to curse. The students, I know, will keep cursing. So here’s what I’m doing: I’m starting a swear jar. If I hear a student curse, drop at least a nickel into the jar. If they don’t have any change, I give them a referral and call their parents to tell them what their child said. It’s my little way of saying, “fuck you” without actually saying, “fuck you.”