Lucky F

at my school every 4 weeks the students are given final grades that determine whether or not they move onto the next level. the past session i taught two different classes, one of which focused on reading and writing. despite a lazy work ethic among the students, several incidents of plagiarism, and one major cheat-for-all near-disaster of a final exam, i succeeded in introducing them to the idea of an essay and teaching them how to organize their ideas within this structure, and overall i felt quite satisfied with my job. those students were a lot of fun and i'm happy i now get to teach most of them again in my slang class, which has thankfully been resumed for the new session.

there was one student who almost didn't make it though. his grammar, for lack of a desire to state this more professionally, was all fucked up, and he couldn't even manage to arrange these mangled sentences in a logical sequence half the time. lucky for him that grading essays is subjective and i just don't have the heart to give someone an F if they at least put in the effort, especially when there are other students who hand in essays entirely cut and pasted from the internet; and that all the reading tests were curved, because he technically failed them all. i felt i could look past all that because he seemed to work hard, but this one really pushed the limits of my goodwill. check out his journal entry for day 1:

This is the first day i meet my teacher. His name is M, he teachs us about R/W intermediate. The First time, I think he maybe handsome, Funny, Friendly. But If I see him again, I can see his teeth maybe don't straight with other teeth. I like it. It's a lucky teeth. Maybe, It's make him better...

i started laughing when i read this, and then abruptly stopped because i didn't want anyone seeing my 'lucky teeth.' i consoled myself with the thought that maybe it was unlucky to smile without fear of someone seeing my scraggle tooth, and then flipped through the rest of the journal to see if he had written anything about my 'lucky eye' or 'lucky height,' and i wondered if he had taken notice of my 'lucky haircut' - the one with the fucked up fade where the lady must have thought it was 'lucky' to have the hair on one side of my head be noticeably longer than the hair on the other side.

so my parents must have been bursting with joy when they first saw my foot which, fortunately for me, was twisted inwards because having both feet point in the same direction, particularly forward, must be extremely unlucky. and then i realized shit, all these blind, amputee war vets and deformed orange babies wandering around the streets of saigon must be the luckiest fuckers on the planet. in fact before, i had felt this student was lucky to pass this class, but then i thought maybe the little bastard would prefer a lucky f. ...but instead i decided i'd just post his most embarrassing, i mean luckiest, confession:

My past was very beautiful. When I was a child I used to sleep with my parents. I used to cry all day...

lucky childhood, eh? gayboy.