I Hope Laughing Is Considered Professional

For the most part, I’m able to contain my laughter enough that only students in my class can hear me – but sometimes I'm attacked by uncontrollable laughter and I'm sure students in the neighboring classrooms can as well.

Sometimes it's something small, like a pronunciation mistake. Just yesterday, we had the word “photographer” but one kid read it, “potato-grapher” which I thought was pretty hilarious.

Other times, it's something that I really shouldn't laugh at. Yesterday, one of my kids who is really smart (but is often disruptive) was being a giant pain in the butt. At one point, when he raised his hand, he threw his head back and accidentally smacked it on the desk behind him. He was fine but it sounded like it really hurt. I probably should’ve yelled at him for messing around, but instead I just laughed…really, really hard.

No matter what I'm laughing at, though, the students never understand why I think it's funny and that's a good thing, especially in the case of what happened the other day. It's well-known that ESL learners have a lot of trouble pronouncing the –ed ending on words where the –ed sounds like [t] and my kids are no exception. They always say “finished” when they complete an activity but it sounds like [fin-ish-ed] rather than [fin-isht] so I always hound them about it. The other day, I made one kid repeat it like 15 times because he was improving but still didn’t quite have it. Eventually I emphasized only the very last part for him…the [sht] sound. He was annoyed with me but was trying his hardest anyway. He used his whole body to try this one last time and you could see in his face how hard he was working. He slapped his hands down on the desk for emphasis and, lo and behold, he yelled “shit!” (I should mention that Koreans have trouble saying consonants without a vowel in between them.) I cackled full-force and couldn’t stop laughing for way too long. My students kept asking me what was so funny but, since I couldn’t explain the real reason, I said it was the face he made when he said it. He was embarrassed and I felt bad about laughing at him but I really couldn’t stop. I had little outbursts for the entire rest of the class. It wasn’t exactly professional, but it was awesome. :)