Jungle Justice

I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "street justice;" I'm also sure you're familiar with hyperbole and alliteration and how wonderful they are. I don't technically live in the jungle, but Dimako is surrounded by it/ Call it literary license.

Friday I thoroughly regretted not having a camera on me. As I'm sure you're well aware based on this blog and my France one, I am not a photographer. After one of my favorite French classes ever, I even had the perfect excuse: If you experience life through a lense, you are not truly experiencing life, but observing it.

Anyway, one Friday I had just finished proctoring my first two-hour exam and was waiting on the bell to head over for my second one. I was planning on using the time to grade my exams, but the students were cleaning the teachers' lounge as a punishment*, so I was forced to wait outside and be sociable.

After some time spacing out in a fever-induced haze, I noticed the hubbub across the street at the gendarmerie (police station). There were a couple of people outside holding chickens and the cops were talking to them.

Apparently two former students of the Lycee Technique had been caught stealing chickens.

The cops marched the thieves across the street with the chicken corpses tied around their necks. They were paraded through the school, so the students could jeer at them and hopefully learn not to steal.

All the teachers just nodded and said, "La honte, c'est utile." (Shame! It's useful.)

I have definitely found that to be true in my attempts at classroom management. When I catch my students cheating, I march them to the front of the classroom (in front of 60 or so of their classmates) and point and call them cheaters. I tell the whole class the consequence for their actions - a 0 for the sequence and an hour with their nose on the wall. It seems very effective thus far; none of the same students cheated this sequence that cheated during the last one.

Side note: I've been rereading and rewatching the Harry Potter books/movies. In the first movie, when the troll gets let into the castle, all the students are panicking and screaming and Dumbledore yells, "SILENCE!!!" All the students calm down and be quiet immediately. I would love it, if that happened in my classes. Instead, I am forced to teach my idiomatic phrases with the conditional.

Example: If the students take crazy pills, they will be crazy. If the students hadn't taken crazy pills, they wouldn't have told their teacher, "I love you."

It made it even better that the students in question were 20 15-year-old girls.

*Students here have to do manual labor as punishment - using machetes to cut the grass, working in the school garden, cleaning the offices and classrooms, etc.