I teach intermediate English for 6 1/2 hours a day, which can be interesting and draining. I've not spent this much time with 11-12 year olds since I was in 6th grade and I'd really forgotten what it was like. In some ways, I really like my students, and in other ways they seem impossibly immature. I must say though, by the time 8:30 at night rolls around, my sense of humor has also dropped a few maturity points as well. In my classes, the funniest thing, especially for boys, is the W.C. Most of these kids have learned British English, and so, if they want to be risque and inappropriate in English class, they do so by making jokes about the W.C. Of course to me, it's funny in a different way to hear 12 year old boys using the rather stuffy euphamism "W.C." for toilet. "You are W.C. man" is a big insult, followed closely by "Your mother live in W.C." Whenever we play a word game, one student always has to mention the W.C., followed by the requisite titters. Of course, next to the W.C., girl friends and boy friends are also a sure way to make a splash. If I want to make the class laugh uproariously, all I need to do is ask a student about his or her boyfriend or girlfriend. For example, one boy was goofing off, and in revenge, I asked him, "were you and your girlfriend at the park last night?" The two or three kids in the class who knew "girlfriend" in English started shouting "yes! yes! say yes!" and eventually the boy said yes. A kid translated the sentence and answer into Chinese, and the class started shrieking "you have a girlfriend." The boy turned bright red and the class (including the boy) burst into giggles. Another hilarious thing is if there is ever a picture of an ugly person, if someone's friend points to it and says "who's that?" the answer is often "your girlfriend." This means that actual sort of interaction between girls and boys is clearly taboo. One of my classes is impossibly noisy, to the point other teachers have to come over and complain (they are rare in that they are noisy but fairly strong students who overall do pay attention). One day I assigned them an essay "Why am I so noisy?" as homework. I received fairly hilarious results, given that their English writing skills are not quite at paragraph or perhaps even sentence level yet (that can be another post). A few days later, I threatened in desparation to seat them boy-girl, the ultimate punishment. I had to carry through, and I have to say, the effectiveness of the noise reduction was completely offset by the whining and sulking the new seating caused. Half the class refused to do any partner work with a person of the opposite sex, and one girl was almost in tears.
On a somewhat less humorous note, another big insult is to call someone Japanese. Saying that someone speaks Japanese, or is Japanese, or has been to Japan is probably the biggest put down after calling someone a W.C. man. In the text book I use, there is a Japanese foreign exchange student as one of the characters. When I showed his picture in the front of the book to the kids, one boy said, oh, he looks Chinese. When I said, no, he's Japanese, the kids were totally stunned and the boy who made the comment looked sheepish. It's hard to know what to say to comments like that. If something is really extreme, like "we should kill Japanese people," I usually frown and say it's inappropriate, but it's hard to know how to deal with this undercurrent of pervasive nationalism.
(I had another bad experience on a similar note. We were learning nationality, and to get the kids to answer, I asked them questions like "are you Korean?" and they would say "no, I'm Chinese!" I had asked them if they were Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese, and I decided for kicks to ask boy if he was Thai. After I did, all the kids started pointing and laughing and calling him Thai, and I realized he was slightly darker than the others. Then one kid shouted, "yeah, he's African!" and I knew I had made a horrible mistake that brought out a rather ugly side of Chinese racism. I told the kids that they were being inappropriate, and then I asked the lightest skinned student in the class if she was Thai to show that it was random, but I felt I probably should have thought that out better beforehand).