Tee Hee

A few days ago, while correcting the kids' papers, I came around to... eh, we'll call him.. Joe. His sentences were something like:

1. My family owns a house in the country
2. I have four older brothers.
3. I love a girl in this class.

When I corrected his paper, he whispered, "This is the false one," pointing to number three. I laughed. Ok.

Everyone began reading their sentences, some funnier than others. Eventually it was Joe's turn. He read numbers one and two and then stammered a bit before saying, "I don't want to read number three out loud. Can I just write it?"

"Sure," I said, remembering the sentence and not wanting to make him uncomfortable. The point of the lesson is to get people comfortable with speaking English in front with their classmates, not the opposite. Plus, the boy is sixteen - I can see how it could be awkward at that age.

Naturally, a lot of hoo-ha was made about number three. The girls started looking around and came to the consensus that number three was the lie. Lots of questions of "Who would it be?" and "A girl in this class?" floated around the room. The boys had mixed reactions; some voted for one or two. I went with number three, considering Joe had told me earlier that it was the lie.

To maintain suspense, I asked the kids to erase the first truth and then the second, leaving only the lie on the board. This usually creates a stir as those who voted for a truth see their vote get erased. I taught them the verb "to fool" and we practiced saying, "Joe fooled Elizabeth" and the like.

So naturally, when Joe erased number two, only a few people reacted. But when he erased number three, jaws dropped to the floor. The girls looked around at one another, eyes wide. I could tell they were sizing one another up to see who could be the object of Joe's affections.

"Ooo... a little bit of mystery for the school year! This is getting exciting!" I said, genuinely happy to have a budding romance revealed right under my nose.

"Who is it?" one of the girls insisted.

I rubbed my hands together mischievously.

"I'm not going to tell." he said surprisingly cooly. He went back to his seat with a bunch of girls pestering him about who it could possibly be. Even when I had called forward the next student, they were still stuck on it. But Joe wisely stuck to his decision to not spill the beans in the slightest.

The rest of the hour passed uneventfully. At the end of class, one of Joe's friends - Thomas - walked up to my desk and looked toward the back of the room and smiled. What is he doing? I wondered, and realized that Joe was in the back with a cell phone that doubles as a camera.

"No, no, no... no pictures. I hate pictures...." I mumbled as I gathered my stuff up off my desk. I had a class to go to and my shit was everywhere. Thomas just laughed and walked to the back to see the picture.

Curious, I followed him and went back to look at the picture, too. What I saw surprised me: in fact, Joe hadn't taken a picture of Thomas and me at all. Nope. He had taken a picture of just me, smiling but with my head slighly down, calmly trying to ignore the camera. Thomas was just there for effect, so I wouldn't think anything of it.

I looked at Joe and a moment passed. My brain said, Just act normal. You're his teacher.. "Wow, it's actually pretty good quality, huh?" I asked, surprisingly naturally. "I'm surprised."

"This is the newest cell phone on the market. The best you can get," he said, and left it at that.

An exciting year indeed.