Have you ever thought about what the consequences might be if you said something particularly stupid to a classroom? Would the students laugh at you, or not take you seriously? What if your supervisor lectured you?
Well, as someone who told a classroom full of 9th graders that “Napoleon was pretty fly for a white guy,” I can now confirm that it’s actually not all that awful.
The lesson was simple enough: let’s learn the basic of Napoleonic France. We can talk about what he did right (patriotism) and what he did not-so-right (invading Russia in the winter), and it’ll be a quick overview of the chapter. My supervisor was leading the helm on this lesson, and I was just adding in tidbits from the book he’d missed or trying to explain why Napoleon might’ve done something to the class.
We were half way through the lesson when one of the students pointed out that Napoleon was kind of an idiot (we’d just hit the whole “invading Russia in the winter” thing, and the class thought it was a bad move, understandably). Now, as a total history nerd, and someone who spends too much time swapping memes, pop culture references, and bad puns with her friends, I felt like I just had to defend Napoleon to this 9th grader, and somehow, my brain decided that the appropriate, educated response to give was “Hey, man, Napoleon was pretty fly for a white guy.”
I am a white woman straight out of a middle class family, and as I stared down that classroom full of inner city 9th graders, I felt as though time had momentarily stopped. My supervising teacher was staring at me with his mouth slightly open, as if he wasn’t too sure what to say as a follow up to that. The class looked torn between shock and confusion (did the teaching assistant actually just say that?) and laughing (because yes, yes she did). I could feel anxiety swirl in my stomach, though I held it together, shrugged, and finished that stunning performance with “What? I stand by my assessment.”
The class snickered, my supervisor called everything back to order, and we went right on our way. Needless to say, for the rest of that semester, I thought back to that moment with embarrassment, thinking that I really did need to work on my filter.
At the end of the semester, I had each student I taught write out a little evaluation of sorts on me, asking what I did well and what I needed to work on. Overall, the class knocked off some points on my inability to remember names, but to my shock, the most positive review was that I was “hilarious” and “entertaining to watch.” Review after review said that they had fond memories of my lessons if only because they “never knew what was going to come out of my mouth,” and it made them pay more attention to me when I taught.