Shit, the Shit, and Why Almost People Love Wet Dreams

another 4 weeks of teaching vietnamese students "english" has passed (unlike 5 out of 10 of my SSP students, though it wasn't my fault... i swear) and you know what? it's a pretty cushy gig. i walk in, do the damn thang, and go home. i mean at least until someone hires me as the chief product tester at a sock factory or whore house, or perhaps both. though it would be tragic if one day i accidentally fucked a sock and stuck my foot up some ho's ass. i mean...

"welcome to my class!" by this time, i'm well known among all the students as "crazy matt," though i've asked them to just call me mat. yeah i'm the teacher that starts class late and finishes early. yeah i'm the one that'll pass you as long as you're not certifiably retarded or boring (the 5 who failed were certifiably absent way too much). yeah and i'm the one whose class you go to if you want to watch a short, goofy american dancing to ecstasy music with his students. but on calm days if you look in my class you might just find me bobbing my head to wu-tang, mouthing the words while the students read along to the lyrics. and i'll spend several minutes talking about a line like:

first thing's first man, ya fuckin' with the worst
i be stickin' pins in ya head like a fuckin' nurse

this gem from odb's got it all: slang, metaphors, similes, and, my personal favorite, dirty words. this past session i wanted to make sure my "idioms in conversation" class understood the fine line between something being "shit" and "the shit," though i'm not quite sure they understood. i can't blame them though because the vietnamese equivalent, cut , means only one thing: feces. and there are no articles, so everytime they hear the word, they picture a big steaming pile of excrement. but ever since i told'em that "shit" could mean practically anything, whenever i ask them to use slang to describe something the word "shit" is inevitably mentioned. "yes clothes can be 'shit,' but with the way you're using it, it sounds like the person's actually wearing a shirt made out of... shit" i'm certain, however, that they know that being shit-faced isn't usually good, but it's better than eating shit or smelling like shit, and really that's the important thing.

i'll admit that i've taken it upon myself to educate the youth of vietnam in the ways of english, or perhaps more specifically, american vulgarity, but at least i didn't teach them about masturbation, right? ...right? nahhh, they taught themselves (or each other) way before they ever met me. it became somewhat of an obsession among the upper-level students after one student misunderstood an assignment and wrote an entire essay about self-gratification. the topic came up almost everyday in my SSP class despite my best efforts to do nothing about it. it got to the point where they were talking about it more than i was actually do- well no, that's not true. but if someone got up to go to the bathroom they were going to masturbate. when i asked them to come up with sentences using the grammar we had learned then someone would inevitably be masturbating in an adjective clause or simply conjugating all over the place. one day we were talking about heroes and how people look up to them (not at them) when one student noted that a hero may be someone who masturbates a lot. i told him that he must be the greatest hero of all time and he agreed. then he pointed to another student and said that this other student admires him so much that he always looks at him when he masturbates.

maybe because the school is 95% male or maybe because they're almost all between the ages of 16 and 24, but everyone, even the girls, seemed to love this topic. i started slang class off one day with a whole bunch of "yo momma" jokes and told'em their assignment was to insult the mothers of their classmates. some of the gayer students refused because they said it was "impolite" or "terrible," so i said they could compare anyone to anything as long as it made me laugh. most of the shit they came up with would have gotten the student laughed at rather than punched in the face if they ever tried using it in a real situation, but some were pretty funny. i liked this one: "yo momma's so fat, her shit makes the whole world stink." ("shit" really was the word of the day in that class for 4 consecutive weeks.)

but the crown for mastur-metaphorator went to the same student who wrote about my "lucky teeth." his read: "[that girl] is so sleepy she's making me have a wet dream." like everything he wrote it doesn't really make sense, but it's funny nonetheless. then about a week later, we were listening to a song and a student i'd dubbed "dick" (for short) had fallen asleep. the students next to him started laughing because he'd left a puddle of drool on the lyrics sheet, and one of them astutely pointed out that he had just had a wet dream. to this student i gave the highest mark for the day and let the dick bathe in the shame of a wet dreamer.

so what if i fuck around sometimes? these students study english for 6 hours a day 5 days a week, and i figure they need a little entertainment in that time. but i always help them with whatever problems they have, even in english. for example, "almost." see, they think "almost" means some quantity between "all" and "most." ie: "almost people had fun at the party." this confuses a lot of students so i told them why this is wrong. i explained that things that are almost people are not fully human. i wanted to say: "some people say that niggers are almost people, though others believe they're not even close to being people - they're actually animals." but they wouldn't understand that because they're not racist like my ignorant american ass. no, they're nationalist. so i just replaced "niggers" with "cambodians" and then they all understood.

slang is on hold for the time being so starting monday i'll be teaching the only other subject i know anything about... no not masturbation: lying. well, it's called "drama," or some shit like that and it's really just for speaking practice. but if it goes as well as slang i'm sure almost students will think it's the shit.

peace y'all 'mout.