sábado, 9 de febrero de 2008

Why I am a hooligan

Hi there!
My name is Ana, but some of you at the I.E.S. Valdemorillo think I am Juli.
What many of you don't know is what Juli stands for.
This is how it all began.
A few years ago I was teaching a group of 3ºESO students who were always talking and interrupting the lessons doing weird things. You know how nervous I get in class, you all know about my yelling and how I always want to do too many things in class. I sometimes feel some of the things I want you to do with me are not possible if the class is chaotic. And that particular day some of my students were giving me a hard time, I kept checking my watch because I could see how I was running out of time and how I was using it up to ask them to be quiet. Things weren't quite working out so I got really angry and said out loud: "YOU ARE ALL HOOLIGANS!".
All of a sudden, they all stopped talking and looked at me. The bell rang.
I felt funny. I didn't really know what to do. I am a teacher, you know... and the trouble is that I can't always behave like a teacher. So I let it be, after all there wasn't much I could do about it now, the words had already been spoken...
The thing is every time I bumped into some of the students in that class they would greet me :"Hi, hooligan!" and since it had been me the one that had started the "war", I couldn't help but smiling. Day after day, week after week, they would greet me the same way, even omitting the Hi! and so all they would say is Hooligan!. When they wanted to be more affectionate or reduce the risk of getting a parte they would short it out with Hooli.
It's amazing how quickly some things spread. Soon all the students at the IES were calling me Hooligan or Hooli. But the ones who didn't know me and were just repeating what they had heard thought my name was Juli, and Juli I remain.
The ones in 1ºESO think I am Juli, which, quite honestly, is an option I prefer!. I don't think hooligans are an example to follow, and I'd rather interpret the term loosely.
One day I went down to the cafeteria to tell Almudena, the lady who runs the business, to write me down on her list of teachers who wanted to stay for lunch that day. I was most surprised when I saw her write "juligan" on her white blackboard. She looked at me and said: "What is this, your surname?"
So, thanks Mochu, thanks Harry...you are the ones to blame.
Moraleja: "Rebota, rebota y en tu culo explota"