What Am I Doing Here?

One of the many responsibilities I have as a teacher here in Al Ain is the homeroom teacher for the grade 7 boys.  I specify boys because after grade 3 the boys and girls are segregated for religious culture reasons. 

Now being the homeroom teacher for this class is about the same as being a zookeeper.  Not that I have any experience as a zookeeper, but I can imagine it shares many similarities.  For insistence you have to know how to tame the wild creatures, keep the weak ones from getting pounded on, worry about the mess left behind, the destruction to their habitat and keep water fights from breaking out at the waterhole.  These are all things I have to worry about on a daily bases, with new and exciting things popping up every week.  Like last week’s non-stop phrase of the week: cala boca, which is Portuguese for ‘shut your mouth’.  I can thank my Brazilian student for teaching the whole class that phrase after finding out that I can speak Portuguese.  Let’s just say if I got paid 1 Dirham for every time it was said, I would have made more money with that then I actually got paid.

This week’s fad was elastic band slingshots.  It was a week of me watching folded up pieces of paper flying across the room every time they thought I wasn’t looking; they even got creative one day and began using kernels of popcorn to launch at each other.  I began to feel like an elastic band dictator, not allowing the students into the class until they surrendered their elastic bands; keeping my eye open for their new creative ways of hiding them; like in the soles of their shoes and up their arms where their sleeve would cover it.  Now if they only would put that much effort into learning science.

Now you can imagine how appalled I was upon entering the class at the end of the day, only to see pieces of folded up paper all over the floor.  I was getting ready to give the entire class detention when I noticed the teacher teaching my homeroom class with something in his hand.  I couldn’t make it out at first, so I looked a little closer… it was AN ELASTIC BAND SLINGSHOT!!! The teacher was flinging pieces of paper across the room laughing it up with the rest of the class.

I was too stunned to react and just walked out.  And then, just like so many other times before, I asked myself… ‘What am I doing here?’

Bryan The Camel says…

            What’s a waterhole?