What have your funniest teaching moments been?

This piece is designed to spread a little joy approaching the festive season. One thing’s for sure: the wonderful world of teaching will always surprise you.

1) Top dog

An awfully nice fellow who works for a retail company made a faux pas while having a group online business class. He realised his error and joined in the laughter. He had said he was the ‘head of the cocks’, which sounds rather odd, but when you know what this means in his first language, which is Dutch, it makes perfect sense. ‘Kok’ is a chef and he is in charge of the chefs. So, it was a case of L1 language interference in the first order. He may never live it down, but thankfully, he has an excellent sense of humour.

2) One of them

It is dangerous to bite the hand that that feeds you. Let’s just say that a British-Dutch citizen should be able to make fun of one of his two nationalities if he wishes. Right? Well, it seems that not everyone comprehends the citizenship rules, which are that through what’s called ‘optie’ aka ‘option’, you become Dutch if your mother is from the Netherlands (after a good old bit of bureaucracy). Even after mentioning having dual citizenship in the first lesson, some are just not used to this phenomenon. Anyhow, in one lesson somebody took offence to an innocent jibe at the Dutchies; my fellow countrymen and women no less, and when asked if I didn’t like the Dutchies, which is preposterous, I pulled out my ID card and asked ''why would I feel like this when I AM DUTCH?'' The silence was golden after that. ?

3) Put the blame on you

Tact & diplomacy is notoriously difficult for Dutch people and one task in particular goes over the heads of any students lower than B2 level. At some point, a student had unintentionally provided a piece of gold dust. A statement so rude that any British person would be mortally offended before the utterance had been made. ‘It’s not my problem!’ was mentioned in the context that a customer wanted to find out what had happened to his delivery and the customer service agent had shown her true colours or could have just been extreme directness; perhaps we will never know. ‘’Unfortunately, it is not something I can resolve myself. Would you like me to put you through to the correct department’’. ?Ah how polite; this was the British way complete with a comforting softener and a tactful, indirect approach. Though, this only came after a hilarious retort. When told ‘’You should never ever say this to an English person. It is extremely rude’'. The lady in question replied: ‘'but it’s not my problem!’'.

4) Wakey wakey!!

Online lessons should never be boring. With a healthy dose of interaction, a varying pitch, plenty of passion, enthusiasm in spades and captivating charisma, you should be able to enthral anyone. Sadly, none of this would matter during one particularly surprising evening lesson. One young student had had a late night, which would catch up with her, and she was accustomed to lying on her bed when she had lessons. This time, it did not work out for her in terms of her learning experience. She had fallen asleep and was lost to the world. Despite the teacher and another student calling her name, she remained in Noddy land and stayed there until the end of the lesson. She only apologised in the next lesson.

5) Give them a piece of your mind

In-company lessons usually go like clockwork, and you get on with the job in hand and that’s that. However, on this day, the meeting room in a hotel had been double booked and my student, a fiercely fiery, amazingly assertive, global brand manager gave the receptionist a piece of her mind. When she is in full force, nobody stands a chance. It was almost embarrassing to witness, but, thankfully, it was over in a jiffy, and, next thing we knew, we had our lesson in a suite overlooking a private plane hangar. Perhaps not the most appropriate place to go with a female student where there is a bed and a mini fridge, but it was certainly one for the books.

6) Number 9 in oil company

This is not fiction. Although, it does sound far-fetched. An oil executive whose claim to be quite high up in an oil company in a central Asian country reminds one of a line from Austin Powers. This gentleman was a chain-smoker, who had 10-minute conversations on his phone in his 1st language leaving his teacher in another room. He stayed in the best suite at a central hotel in the Hague, and, boasted that he would fly over some prostitutes from Ukraine. No idea why he decided to tell this to his English teacher though. In the last lesson, he gifted his teacher a bell, which said ‘ring for sex’ on it. This present, it should be pointed out, was given to his red-faced educator in the middle of a fancy restaurant once the course had finished.

7) Topsy turvy

Democracies have their downsides. In the Netherlands, sometimes, freedom of expression goes a bit too far. Teaching at a private secondary school with teenagers who have behavioural and psychological problems is not for the faint hearted. Apart from kids with ADHD shoulder barging into each other before the lesson started or other tomfoolery, there was one particularly spiteful, malicious young lady who eventually got herself expelled. She took it upon herself one afternoon to rally the troops and lead them downstairs. It was a perfectly acceptable speaking activity with questions that the students could ask each other in pairs. Perhaps she was not used to the format, but still, to march class members down to the principal’s office in protest took things a little too far.

8) About turn

Discussions about religion and politics may be risky to discuss with students. It turns out that these are not the only topics that can cause a stir. One student, a Managing Director of a retail company, told me, a teacher, that ‘teachers don’t deserve more money’ (in relation to secondary schools). This was hard to take and after explaining why I believe they should receive more in this country, he apologised, explaining that he has to be tough in his job otherwise he would not be able to survive. This was an interesting excuse, but I took the apology.

9) Flipping eck

Cheating a bit with this one as it was a fellow teacher’s colleague who had this experience. During the Corona crisis, schools had all their lessons online. It took some time to get used to this new way of learning and some of course tried to take advantage of the situation to misbehave. One such lad was a keen cook it seems. He was caught flipping pancakes in the middle of his lesson. Alas, nobody knows which flavour he was making at the time.

10) Improper Body language

Teaching presentation skills to biomedical students is usually uneventful. Though, one fellow raised a few eyebrows as part of his feedback when giving a presentation was that he should button up his shirt as his chest hair had been sticking out; improper body language no less. Moreover, this was in the same session a fellow presenter had been scolded for leaning on his pointer. Needless to say, everybody had a good laugh.