November 4, 1998

Do you know how much high school students swear? Especially the boys. I KNOW, I know, girls swear too. I'm sure I swore in high school, but I don't think I EVER swore in a class. At least not loud enough for the teacher to hear me. But with boys, it's like they're exempt from the laws of propriety that say you don't swear in class. I subbed today in a Foods class (they still offer Foods classes?...) and sat on a stool, watching 20 groggy kids whip up Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cakes at 7:30 in the morning. I thought the boys were so cute, reading the recipie to each other and mixing things and measuring Crisco and sugar and washing dishes and arguing about whether "1 t." was a teaspoon or a tablespoon. At first their swearing kind of blew over my head. Then, when I noticed it, I started giggling, because it just sounded so funny. "Wait. Don't we have to put all the dry shit in together?" "No. Just mix the shit all up. It don't fuckin' matter." "How much of this crap did we need?" "I wonder what this tastes like alone?...Oh, shit! It tastes fuckin' nasty!" "Man, you fucked those directions up. It says to only pour in half the batter at first." If one of them made eye contact with me immediately after swearing, I gave them a stern, disapproving look and they apologized. But mostly I just laughed at them.