Dealing with the Difficult Class. With Fish.
My housemate's godmother is an English teacher. (Friend of a friend, I know, but my housemate isn't the type to peddle urban legends...)

At the start of one academic year, the teaching allocations were distributed, and said godmother realised, to her horror, that she had a particularly notorious class to teach. They were a bottom-of-the-bottom-set English group, and had a reputation for acting up and wreaking havoc and misery upon anybody that tried to bring Shakespeare within pissing distance of them.

So, rather than worry for the fateful day, this teacher decided upon a pre-emptive strike. She already knew this group were going to be a bunch of revolting arseholes - try pressing ahead as normal and they'd walk all over her.

She bought a tin of tuna and a tin of cat food. Then, she stuck the label from the cat food onto the tuna can.

The class swaggered in and saw her apparently eating cat food from a tin with a fork. I'm told their expressions were initially mixed - some defiant, some confused. Eventually, a general sense of mild fear settled over them. That woman was just eating cat food...wasn't she? Erm...okay...

And although various of these little arseholes went on to cause mayhem in all their other classes, she apparently got through the year with minimal trouble from them.

Miaow...

EDIT: I have since been reminded of another tale relating to this woman. She apparently had a plan for the day when she received a set of coursework submissions that was so bowel-numbingly, arse-clenchingly, rectum-voidingly* bad that, quite honestly, to not even mark them would be an act of kindness.

No, on that day she was going to put them on the passenger seat of her car and drive to the coast. She was going to park as close as she could to the edge of a cliff, get out of the car and open all the doors, and then wait for a good gust of wind.

Perhaps fortunately for her students, this hypothetical stack of coursework never arrived - she was waiting for a particularly 'special' set, because, as she said, "It's the kind of the thing you could possibly get away with once in your career..."

*_{Yes, I know it's not a word...}
(LongJohnBaldry, Tue 3 Feb 2009, 16:23, Reply)