malas palabras en espanol.

Today was Friday and luckily the kids were a little more calm. I gave second period a lecture about how the only difference between them and first period was how on task they were. I congratulated them on their 75 percent test average but told them I knew they could do better.

One student Mario has been giving me all sorts of trouble. We've gotten in arguments about whether or not "hell" is appropriate classroom language, or if it's okay to say "fuck" if it's quiet. He's always turned around facing backwards in class, and I'm always trying to fix it. Today I had some success asking him a bunch of easier questions, but the day ended in disaster, more for him than for me.

We have a progression of consequences on the wall, starting with a non-verbal warning, going to a verbal warning, then a reflective slip, then a parent phone call. I'd been trying everything with Mario, warning him, making him write reflections and I told him if he did anything else in the last ten minutes of class I would call his parents because I had warned him so many times.
One of the more humorous things he had done to deserve a warning was call me a concha. Now I wasn't sure exactely what this Spanish word meant but I could tell it was bad as the latinos all laughed at it.
I said, in Spanish(thank goodness for Peru)
I studied Spanish in the University so I don't know all the bad words, but I'm not stupid and I can tell that it's not appropriate. The Latino boys in the corner went wild when they realized I could speak Spanish. The black studetns went wild yelling "tell us what is going on, we can't understand." The class was generally a little out of control at this one.
I went to Mario's desk and asked him privately what the word meant, explaining that I wanted to learn. He told me first that it wasn't a bad word and then that it didn't mean anything. On the bus ride home I found out that it was a degrogatory word for a women's genitals, starting with the same letter. This made me feel a little better about what happened less.
Other things he did were even more blatenly disrespectful. For example, he was taggin the whiteboard with a marker, I told him "you need to erase that." Seemingly he went to go get an eraser but instead got a different marker and as I told him "you can't write on the board" he continued to write only a foot in front of my face.

He was turning around again distracting students and I walked over and told him I was going to call his paretns and that he should go wait with Mrs. Brown for the rest of the class. The class heard, made a big deal out of it, and he walked out the door. He had already gotten one referral for walking out and he was warned that he would be kicked out of summer school at the second one. Ms. Brown was upset because he's a good kid and she'd formed a personal relationship with him. I feel bad and felt like it was unfortunate that the class heard me talking to him, but he uses up so much of my time that other students need more. I felt like I needed to be a better teacher to really know how to deal with him.
I'm not sure if he'll be coming back or not. I'm not sure if I want him to come back or not. Usually it is my lack of confidance in my own skills that makes me want to give up, not so much in the students. I believe someone could help Mario, I just don't know if I can when I'm worried about 20 other things at once.