My second year teaching high school English was undoubtedly as challenging as the first. Year one I had at-risk students and seniors. Year two I had at-risk students, juniors, and seniors. The senior classes, all college prep, were very unbalanced with 85% of the kids being boys, and extremely immature boys at that. Each class’ ratio, boys to girls, was 3:1. At times it was a scene out of Animal House, except it was high school, not college.
I have never been ashamed to admit that I had no idea what I was doing my first two years of teaching. I thought I knew and I did my best, but overall, I was clueless. It didn’t help that we didn’t have strict curriculum guidelines in the English department. I was handed a text book, told where some of the novels were, and told to have a good year. The senior text book had some really great British literature in it (albeit abridged), “Sir Gawain”, “Beowulf”, The Canterbury Tales”, “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table”, poetry, and Shakespeare. I asked some of the other teachers which ones they were teaching and went with it. Never being a huge fan of British Literature after having had to read both Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales in old English, I figured that as long as I could understand the text before I taught it, I would be okay.
Always a giggler at inappropriate, childish things, I knew I was getting a taste of my own medicine when I read the name of the monster in Beowulf and the main characters in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. I wasn’t even ten years older than these seniors so I was pretty familiar with current terms and jokes relating to sex and genitals. I knew I had to pull it together and pretend that the words we would be reading were not all that funny…even though they really were..and still are.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Beowulf the main premise is that Beowulf, an incredible warrior with super human strength and ability needed to rid a village of the monster that lived in the water with his mother. The monster’s name is Grendel. Some of you may already get the joke, some of you may not see why this would be a problem. I will tell you why it is a problem. The area on everyone’s body that is known as the perineum has a plethora of crude nicknames, one of which is grundel. The monster is Grendel, whose name is almost grundel. Put that on the list of things I never in a million years would think could become a part of teaching English.
Upon telling the class to open their books to Beowulf’s beginning page, I felt that immediate acknowledgement of the monster’s name would be wise. Why not? Let’s get the giggles out of the way and be mature about this. I couldn’t go wrong because they would get tired of the joke after realizing that I got it and it wasn’t even that funny. Yeah right.
“Okay guys, we’re going to be reading Beowulf but I want to give you a disclaimer. One of the characters’ names is going to be close to word you will most likely laugh at so let’s get this out of the way now. Beowulf is a warrior and he fights a monster..”
“I thought Beowulf was the monster?” one student claimed.
“Ah, no. The monster is Grendel.” Laughter roared through the classroom, with the token clueless kid not understanding why, and I just kept talking. “Yes, it is close to the word grundel. I know that and I know what it means. Let’s pull it together and start reading.” Someone helped the clueless kid out, who turned bright red, and wanted to disappear into the floor. I explained that I would be reading the story aloud due to the difficulty some British literature could bring. Stifling my own giggle quite well, I read the story aloud. I did this in all of my senior English classes. Of course, after first period, the next period was entering the room with the knowledge of the monster’s name.
“Are we reading about a grundel in here?” one wise ass asked loudly when he entered the room.
“No, we’re reading about Beowulf and the monster he fights.”
“Yeah, but what’s the guy’s name? Is it Grundel?” and on it went each for the rest of the day. I read aloud and made the kids answer some questions for homework so that we could discuss the story the next day.
To suggest I was naïve enough (although hope could also be a factor) to think that they had gotten their fill of grundel would be an understatement. But it wasn’t hope or naivete at all, it was downright stupidity, and there was little I could do having opened the can of worms myself. Today, I would handle it much differently with my students. I’d still giggle to myself, but that is something different altogether.
Each time I asked a question or the students spoke, the boys would reference Grundel, not Grendel. I would correct them but to no avail. Again, given that I opened the can of worms, I couldn’t really punish them. I let the class laugh and one person usually said, “Guys—that’s enough. It’s not funny anymore. It’s stupid” but that didn’t deter them too much. The ability to say such a crude word out loud in front of your teacher and not get in trouble was really exciting for them. It was like I let them swear for the first time. Their eyes were wide open and bright, probably for the first time all year, and everyone was hanging on everyone else’s word to see who would make the next joke.
I wasn’t horrified so much with their laughter or the fact that they knew that I knew what grundel meant. I wasn’t embarrassed when they said it repeatedly. I wasn’t mad at them because I had acknowledged it from the get go. What I was disturbed about was my own faux pas in front of my largest class with the biggest group of a-holes who would be relentless with laughter and ridicule. Discussion started to get underway and without even realizing it I referred to the monster as, you guessed it, Grundel. A couple giggles surfaced as I continued what I was staying and then I stopped. I looked at a boy in the front row and asked him as if no one else could hear, “Did I just say Grundel?” He smirked and answered, “Yes Ms. D, you did.” I rolled my eyes, let the kids laugh, knowing that by the end of the day I would have kids coming up to me with the same bright eyed, excited look saying, “I heard you called the monster Grundel!”
All of that was nothing compared to The Canterbury Tales’, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. The professor I had for Brit Lit in college was also my advisor. He was a much older man, with somewhat of a Brahmin accent, who was very proper and very kind but also very serious. I thought of how badly I was probably disappointing him by tolerating all of the chaos that surrounded these two classic tales, both of which he recited in old English...from memory. He had no time or tolerance for such child’s play and here I was, right in the middle of it. I had practically started it.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Canterbury Tales, it is a story of several unlikely characters traveling together to Canterbury in the 14th century. Each character tells a tale that is entertaining, with the possibility of a hidden joke, to make their long trip less dull. The nun tells a story of a rooster and a fox, one trying to outwit the other, completed with a moral at the end. Simple enough, right? Wrong. They didn’t have simple names for animals back then. It couldn’t just be a rooster. No, it had to be a cock, and I refused to bow down to the immaturity of my students. We would read the tale the way it was written and not substitute rooster for cock.
The same type of thing happened as with Beowulf. Laughing, giggling, young, female English teacher saying cock like she was asking someone to pass the salt. Just lovely, the whole thing. Of course I thought it was mildly entertaining and of course I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with this type of situation. Per usual, it took more than a day to get through the story. Just when I thought the nonsense was over, one of the more well-known class clowns came walking into class asking me, “Are we still reading about cocks today?” I nodded. Indeed, we would continue to read and discuss cocks as if we were reading and discussing Bo Peep.
From there we moved on to Romeo and Juliet where one kid got booted for blurting out a rude statement when Hamlet came out of Ophelia’s closet. That one upset me and not because the student announced that Hamlet was sniffing Ophelia’s panties while in the closet; that would make too much sense. I was upset because I didn’t see it coming and that meant maybe I wasn’t up on the perverse lingo after all.
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