Most embarrassing moment (so far).

"Oh, oh, tell us a funny story. Funny stuff must happen in school every day! I remember when I was at school we got up to so many pranks - it was hilarious! What's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you?"

*sigh*
Um...well there was this one time, Year 8 (nutters) last lesson on a Friday, they walk in after lunch break and there'd been three fights involving members of the class, they were sweaty, angry, loud...looking back it was a recipe for disaster. I was being Observed by an External Observer as part of my training and had planned a perfectly pitched, creative, differentiated lesson that was going to blow her mind. I felt tired from the late hours spent planning the night before, but I also felt slick.

It all started to go wrong from the moment the children entered, really. The lesson was on morning routine - "Le matin". Over the course of the opening 20 minutes things got more and more hectic. At any given point, mini tornados of chaotic behaviour were breaking out at random in different parts of my classroom. C and R were wrestling each other, B was chucking a pencil at A, but hitting T instead, T thought it was A who did it because A laughed so she lobbed something at him, but he dodged her missile so it hit MM instead. The latter screamed for Sir and once again blamed A and so it went on. I valiantly ploughed on with my lesson, conscious with every passing chaotic second that the Observer was noting something down in her Log, looking up at me over her specs before scowling round the room. She later explained to me that her stern looks were meant to scare the kids into some semblance of decent behaviour, but at the time they terrified me, while having no noticeable effect on the Year 8s whatsoever.

In order to comprehend the acute embarrasment that followed you need to picture two things. Firstly, in previous lessons I had used a football terrace-style chant to teach basic vocabulary and to keep the class together as one group. Along the lines of:
Sir: When I say 'rouge', you say 'red'. ROUGE!
Class: RED!
Sir: ROUGE!
Class: RED!
etc...
Secondly, in this lesson I was determined to teach French in French! Teaching in Target Language as it's called requires lots of acting, gesturing, questioning and dynamism to stop pupils from zoning out. So as part of the 'morning routine' lesson, I physically demonstrated je me douche, je me lève, je m'habille...and in the course of the last of these I'd left my jacket on my chair and now strode around the classroom-cum-bombsite in shirtsleeves, putting out fires as best I could, getting more and more flustered and panicked with each incident.

It then followed, that I ran over to K, relieved that a pupil had a legitimate question about the actual work that I had set. While leaning over the desk to help her I heard B pipe up behind me:
B: Hey!...Sir's got a sweaty back...
pause while the cogs turn
B: When I say sweaty, you say back. SWEATY!
Class: BACK!
B: SWEATY!
Class: BACK!

The difference in perspective from the two sides of the classroom really is staggering sometimes. Neither B nor Year 8 remember the incident, while it's clear it will remain with me for a long time to come. And yet I probably do certain things in the course of exercising my responsibilities and my authority of which I am blissfully unaware, but which are magnified in the children's minds and will also not be forgotten for quite a while!