Let this be a lesson...

In Russia, if you disagree with the people in charge you are either shot in your elevator or poisioned with radiation.

Therefore, it is not entirely my fault that in my Russian blood runs a strong sense of authority and even stronger vengence when that authority is crossed.

Thankfully, my Anglo-genetics have tempered this vengance and made it slower...My lines are not easy to cross. It has not, however, mullified the effect of the vegance when my inner Rusnak rears his ugly head.

My seventh graders have crossed the line. They BARRELLED across it actually...with their GSMs in class and MP3 players and incessant talking and asnine question-asking before I can finish explaining something, then asking me forty more times to explain what they missed while asking me the asnine questions. I can't explain things for the volume of "MISS! MISS!"es I get yelled at me. Kids get up and wander around the classroom, peruse the books, steal other kids' backpacks which starts another chorus of "MISS! MISS!," they cheat constantly and without shame or discretion. I feel like I walk into a snake pit every time I let them come in the room.

So today they were doing an extra credit assignment for the test we are taking tomorrow. I told them no cheating. They started wandering around the room looking at eachother's notebooks. I told them the next person who stood would get a 2 (an F), so they started to shout across the classroom. I told them the next person who shouted would get a 2. They started to throw bits of paper with the answers on them. They asked me how to do the exercises (even though the instructions are in Bulgarian and there is always an example) 40 times, and kept hollering "MISS! MISS" and mobbing me at my desk as I wrote the 2s for standing up and shouting.

And I flipped. The Rusnak turned himself on.

I screamed at them to get away from me, to sit down, to shut up and to read the instructions. I told them they had done it, and I was going to give each and every kid a different test tomorrow so they couldn't cheat even if they tried. I told them I would take their tests if I saw then looking at another test. They said I couldn't do that, and I said, "Watch me." A few of the most b*&%$# girls rolled their eyes and said they'd skip tomorrow (and in Bulgarian that means you can't give them a grade), so I told them that I would grade the Extra Credit like a test and put THAT on their grade report (I had already seen theirs and there was not one correct answer.) They just sat, stunned.

But I tell you, this Rusnak vengence is a very productive emotion. I will sit here and make separate tests of each of the 19 monsters if it takes me until classtime tomorrow to do it. The Rusnak will only be assuaged when I can see each of their faces when they realize that for the first time in their little lives, they will not be able to cheat their way through.

Of all the cultural differences I have overcome in my time here, the blatant cheating is something I will never, ever be able to condone. Maybe it is my innate Americaness that tells me you must succeed on your own merit (or at LEAST be called out and publicly humiliated when you cheat and therefore feel a great sense of shame and ruin, which is totally not true in Bulgaria), but it is what has made our country good. It is why we work.

As much as I would like to think I am embarking on this test to serve as a valuable tool to these uneducated Bulgarian kiddos, I fear I am mostly doing it to see the look on their faces when they realize they will be judged on their own merit, and will be found wanting.