There are some days I really hate my job.

This whole past week was one of them. Spending four days in the company of twenty children misbehaving on the streets of Montreal and Quebec is not my idea of a good time. I’ll just give you a few lowlights of a difficult trip:

1.) Having to tell four boys every ten minutes for four days to stop wrestling, punching, kicking or pushing one another around — even after they knocked a guy into the street.

2.) Listening to a frank and complete conversation about masturbation by (and about) some of my students — from forty feet away — in a crowded restaurant.

3.) Having to yell at some of my group in the vast and echoing lobby of the Musee de la Civilisation in le Ville Quebec about not spraying fellow students with fart spray (commercially made fart spray). Wow, does my voice carry when I’m mad.

4.) Watching my students scatter to the four directions into the underground mall in Montreal for an hour and a half, knowing that some of my kids can drink, buy cigarettes, get tattoos or piercings in Canada — and knowing that Montreal’s line of strip joints, massage parlors, sex shops, piercing parlors and more are just outside that door off to the left where the oldest kids are now headed.

5.) Explaining to my assistant headmaster at one in the morning that one of his favorite students has set off the fire alarm in the hotel and nearly started a substantial blaze.

6.) Breaking into tears while the kid in question explained what he’d done to his parents at one:thirty in the morning.

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