Jesus in the classroom

“Jesus Christ!” I was upset. The students weren’t listening to me and then asking me the same question I just answered. It had nothing to do with culture, or language, or poverty or anything else. They were just being lazy.

When I cursed, I articulated every syllable of the two words. The students clearly understood what I said. A stone cold look came over their face. They didn’t know what to think. In this very catholic culture, people rarely use the Christian messiah’s name in vain. Once I calmed down, I’m not sure if they finally listened to me or were still scared because their teacher publicly took the lord’s name in vain.

The next day, I was sitting next to Ronaldo in the teacher’s lounge. He was making a test for his class. When he showed me the diagrams for his resistance of materials test, I noticed at the bottom of the test was the phrase, “Jesus Christo te ama.” Jesus Christ loves you.

I’m not sure the meaning of the juxtaposition between my classroom outburst and Ronaldo’s faithful spirit at testtime. All I can say is that my students seemed to fear something after what I said in the classroom and I noticed, when I read the text at the bottom of Ronaldo’s test, although I wasn’t really stressed at the time, I calmed down.