Thanks to God, as a muslim of mix- arab ethnicity, living in the West, born and bred in the UK, I wondered how I survived to pass the RE (Religious Education) lessons we had at secondary school.
By Year 10, I was entering a phase of surrealism - not quite of the age of seeing Britney Spears around in the corridors; I was being taught about islam & the value of multi-culturalism in a protestant church of England state by a self-confessed British jew who told us he belonged to the moderate liberal synagogue - which made us wonder about the extremely restrictive one. In any case, this teacher survived many long years in service and rated my selfish pieces of work well; it was about getting a good grade. So, "excellent" was good.
Unlike some french language teachers who for some reasons always got "kind of" lynched before the end of term. I vaguely consider the french language as beautiful but never as beautiful as the Arabic.
In that multi-ethnic, multi-everything school with a handful of muslim, arab mix and girls in hijab, modern European languages did not come near as good as English on the league table of results. The Asian languages seemed more popular in proportion. We were all crammed with good doses of Shakespearean language as being part of our English heritage and ID, past, present & future. (Allah knows best)
But vividly now was the french teacher who got terrorised out of the classroom over insignificant teenage nonsense and was blasted out of the room shouting "poubelle" at us, never to come back. Dreamily I thought of something beautiful that I could not quite match to the fury that accompanied his departure.
That teacher was immediately replaced by another who was introduced to us as "Mr So&So your provisional french .......... It was enough said to keep the class in upheaval for the next couple of months because the majority of highly vocal students resented both terms equally "provisional" and "french".
The guy left promptly; someone said they'd painted such graffiti on his car "Go back to Pakistan!" And you see, he was not from Pakistan.
In fact, students of pakistani origin scored better in their language than the school could obtain from the french dept.
Finally, finally, they found a steady good person to teach french with the same old teaching assitants and she retained the respect and attention of most of the class for longer than usual. Her teaching skills and approach motivated 1 or 2 students to take the subject seriously and learn it solidly.
To conclude let's agree that teenagers of any class are also humans.