I have been orally examining my students all week long.

I’m pretty sure that phrase used to sound naughty to me, but in recent weeks it has come to sound perfectly natural. In fact, it is the most common way in our department to refer to the administration of oral exams. I haven’t yet figured out whether the phrase is proper in British English or if it is a Czechism but, either way, I’ve heard it so often that it no longer sounds strange and only occasionally makes me snicker.

My ability to use my own language has really suffered during the year I’ve lived abroad. My colleagues are for the most part phenomenally fluent, and several speak with impeccable British RP accents, to the point where I cannot tell they are not British by birth except when they switch into the z-zh-s-sh-v-k-rich consonant-fest they call their mother tongue. My students, however, are another matter. Except for C., almost everyone who speaks my native language to me during the course of an average day butchers it to some degree or another. Since language is merely convention, I sometimes find it necessary to butcher it in return to make myself understood. Even when such extreme steps are not necessary, though, I still find that strange phrases have crept into my vocabulary. Most of these are British phrases, which are much more common here than American ones. For instance, I rarely say “lorry‚” instead of “truck,” but it has happened. I’ve even talked about the high petrol prices these days. I have completely switched over to talking about my colleagues, never my co-workers, and I don’t even blink when someone mentions stopping at the store for some nappies (those are diapers in britsky, in case you didn’t know). I don’t even mind anymore when I hear someone say that X is different to Y (this is actually the preferred preposition in British grammar, believe it or not). And those are just the British ones. Czechisms are wrong in any language, yet it no longer sounds wrong to me when someone asks “Can I have a question?” I have grown perfectly happy with people’s discussions of the best way how to do something or another, and anymore I cannot honestly tell you whether it is more correct to say “I don’t usually wear plaid” or “I usually don’t wear plaid.” If you can’t tell the difference, you’re perfectly normal, but consider a similar case (“I probably won’t call her” vs. “I won’t probably call her”): Despite your ignorant bliss, there are rules for these things, which foreign learners of the language you can so glibly mumble even in your sleep have to memorize. The end result? My language has been contaminated, and I fear it will never be pure again.

As far as the orals are concerned, everyone has been doing pretty well for most of the week, although I was offered a direct contrast to what I’ve heard referred to in America as “grade inflation.” My experience in school tells me that an A is to be strived for, a B is acceptable but reveals that you never did the homework, and to receive a C is practically as embarrassing as failure. I won’t even mention the D or the F, because high school weeded out the people who get grades like that; they’re happily spreading tar on some highway these days. We are so intent on making everyone feel special that giving a poor grade hurts us as much as the student. We don’t want to label anyone a failure out of fear that it will hurt his self-esteem, so we give him a C at least for trying, even if he didn’t. I noticed this tendency in myself last week as my students waltzed in pairwise for the round of orals that C. and I administered. We gave As to the good students and Bs to most of the rest, which left Cs for only the really poor ones. We gave nothing lower.

In the Souborná Zkouška (“Qualifying Exam”) committee I’m sitting on this week with three Czechs, however, the scale is noticeably different. There are no unique and delicate snowflakes here. Only the three or four exemplary students received As, a few very good students received Bs, and the bulk of the bell curve received Cs. My Czech colleagues were not afraid to hand out Ds, and their system even has an E to better specify exactly how sub-par some students really are.

The thing that surprised me was how the students took the news. I felt just a little embarrassed for the first student when the head of the committee revealed that she would receive a C, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was content to be average. The D students took it in stride; some even seemed relieved. The eyes of the select few, though, those shining diamonds among the coal-dark masses, lit up to hear that they’d been awarded the much-coveted A; it was as if Don Pardo was announcing that they’d won a BRAAAAND NOOOOO CAAAAR! or that a donor kidney had finally been found for their dying mother.

At one point today, the opinion of the committee was overwhelming and I was forced to fail a student for the first time ever. This girl, who has some sort of disability—perhaps cerebral palsy, though I can’t tell for sure—started sobbing when we called her back into the room to announce her failure. I genuinely felt bad for her, because she had applied herself quite diligently throughout the year and was actually one of the harder-working students I’d had. Her English pronunciation simply sucks, and the committee agreed that she should spend the summer working on it. We failed another girl shortly thereafter. She took it much more stoically than the first, but she still ran out of the room without a word as soon as she could.

I began to enjoy the strange feeling of power I felt surging in my veins. I hadn’t felt such a feeling of power over someone’s life since my mom made a late-night call to the house of a girl I saw briefly during the summer after my freshman year at U of I. I had driven into Chicago to hang out with her one night, and we stayed out until early in the morning. At some point, my mom became worried and called the girl’s house to see if I’d left. The girl’s parents were pretty old school and viewed that phone call as such a public humiliation that they grounded the poor girl for the rest of the summer. That might explain why we had only two dates (though a contributing role may also have been played by my failure to live up to the expectations about my personality engendered in her by the Joy Division tee-shirt I always wore back then). Regardless, in much the same way that poor Eva will curse our names all summer long as she practices softening her final consonants and eliding her word transitions, Jodie must have cursed my name every night she spent watching TV with her iron-fisted parents. This isn’t the kind of power that most people dream of, but it’s more than some people ever get. I have hardened my heart against the suffering of others, and the tears of my students no longer arouse my compassion. I look forward to failing more students tomorrow, just because I can. I am now drunk with power. Nothing can stop me.

"Except for Corinne, almost everyone who speaks my native language to me during the course of an average day butchers it to some degree or another."

hey, now. just cause i curse like a sailor and tend to slip the czech in as if it were slang, that is not BUTCHERY. that is CREATIVITY. that's knowing the rules so's you can break 'em. and if we can't break the rules, paul, then the terrorists will already have won.

also: you know what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. watch out, mr. power-drunk teacher person.