Mama said there'd be days like this

I hate Mondays. Maybe I learned this from the SCI, where Mondays meant putting together the paper and dealing with computer crashes, people not understanding the phrase "deadline at noon on Friday" and late nights. Today, I'd gladly spend 24+ hours putting together an impossibly aggravating page of obituaries and traffic reports if it meant I didn't have to see my 11th graders.

The following is a list of things that would most likely come as a complete shock to this group of students:

1. The definition for "respect" is not "never being told no and always getting my way because I'm a privileged individual and I can do whatever I want."

2. I, Mrs. Erin, am not making them speak English in my class because I hate them. I'm not making them speak English in my class because I hate Indonesia, Indonesians or the Indonesian language. I'm making them speak English because a) it's ENGLISH CLASS, and b) my job requires that I enforce an English only rule in my classroom, which is why their wealthy mommies and daddies send them to our school.

3. Copying someone else's homework is, surprise, cheating. Just because you took the time to write it out doesn't make it your work. Also, copying and pasting from the Internet is plagiarism, which is stealing, which is cheating, which is (here's the biggest shock of all) wrong.

4. When I have been sick for almost a whole week and come back to find that the homework due last Tuesday is still not done,I am going to be angry. I have a right to be angry, and I also have a right to hand out detentions and progress reports, which I will do as soon as I am done venting on my blog.

5. I, along with Mr. Travis and the majority of the other expat teachers, enforce the school rules because it is our job to do so, not because we're big bad foreigners who hate Indonesians. If the expats hated Indonesians, most likely they would not leave their families, homes, friends and everything else they knew and move all the way across the world to live there.

Forgive me, I'm still feeling quite under the weather and the local mosque woke me up with its extra-loud call to prayer at 4:30 this morning, after which I never really got back to sleep. So I'm not at my most cheerful and if I seem like I'm complaining a lot (which, yeah, I am) it's because I'm just letting off steam. I'm going to go find myself a cup of coffee and my book of detention slips and look forward to fourth period, when a group of about 20 seventh graders will scamper into my room and bring a little much-needed sunshine to my day.