Walk A Mile In My Shoes (II)

Walk A Mile In My Shoes (II) - And so the saga continued. I simply had to find a way to basically ignore those initially most reluctant comments coming from those Muslim male brats as far as not accepting to be taught by me as a female teacher. They, on the other hand, had to somehow learn to tolerate the fact that they were given no choice other than to put up with me anyway. No question, this was a rather awkward and unspoken compromise both sides ultimately had to come to terms with, and don't ask me how, but one way or another we actually did so. As the tomboy in me finally got the hang of it, those hell boys would slowly come around and at last treat me with the degree of respect I had been demanding all along. And then there was that one Muslim girl who unlike the other two females was always and completely shrouded in her cloak. Holy cow, she proved to be a handful, too, even though rather differently from the boys. She would not speak or rather verbally react at all to any English commands, questions or suggestions. It quickly turned out that she had been carried along by the Austrian school- system forever for reasons of convenience or should I rather candidly say for reasons of avoiding the exact opposite. I was flat- out flabbergasted as that 17 year- old student kept on boldly declining to converse in English altogether simply because she had no command of that language whatsoever! To make matters worse, she did not even have a clue of German! What the heck is right?! How the hell had she ended up in grade 10, let alone in school if she was not able to make herself understood at all? Exactly right, as you may have guessed quite correctly, our corrupt political system must have allowed for that to happen, which meant my school had quite obviously taken in her and all the others that were either most miserable, pretty hopeless or entirely useless no- future students of foreign, mostly Muslim origin, primarily due to fat financial incentives and guaranteed federal subsidies. Just great! So there I was once again in the middle of an absolutely bureaucratically schemed apocalypse fighting Goliath in David's shoes. Incredibly, that Muslim student constantly needed one or the other girl to translate so I could establish at least some form of verbal contact with her since she honestly knew neither English nor German. Unreal, I felt as if I had been caught "in the wrong movie" as we like to jokingly call it. Anyway, when I insisted on seeing one of her parents since there was just no way to assess or mark her in the least, the sulky father showed up about two weeks later. On spotting me, he outright refused to speak to me because after all I was not a man. Alright, as humiliated as I felt, I pulled myself together and went to find a male colleague. Quite ironically, I happened to fetch the girl's German teacher. Now, just picture that poor old bastard of an unrelentingly and mercilessly ridiculed individual almost deaf and above all a raging alcoholic - arguably a direct consequence of the longterm abuse of having been exposed to those godforsaken punks - as he stumbled towards that disgruntled father who just did not feel like discussing any of that crap concerning his daughter. I am fairly convinced had it been about his son, this would have gone entirely differently. Never mind, now I was obligated to take on the ungrateful role of a translator between a man hard of hearing and another male thickheadedly racist. Well, to cut a long story short, I made sure that that girl was ultimately flagged and consequently removed from the educational system since she had not been contributing anything in the least. In case, you are now wondering where her mother was that day or rather why she did not make an appearance herself, let me quickly illustrate the following. That Turkish woman, too, had no German language skills despite having lived in German- speaking Austria for almost 20 years. What's more, as a Muslim female, she was certainly not allowed to leave her own house without male escort which explained why she had failed acquiring any German to begin with and could not have seen me anyway even if she had been able to. It would take a while for me to wrap my brain around all of that, for sure. Okay, one morning, a French teacher colleague, another severe alcoholic, told me all taken aback that she had just run into one of our joint Muslim students who had rather audaciously changed the side of the street to avoid eye- contact. Say what??? - More next week.