I am Dutch, and we Dutch are not very polite, at least not in the eyes of some other peoples. Maybe it’s because we are known throughout the world as a hard-working no-nonsense sort of people, who can’t be bothered with polite niceties like “excuse me” and “please” but this is never a problem with other Dutch people, because they behave just the same, apart from old crones like me who can still not get used to the way people behave nowadays.
I blame the soap series, really. We have on in particular here called “Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden” (Good Times, Bad Times) and when I got back into teaching 11 or 12 years ago I was slightly amazed at the language the students were using. When I discovered what their favourite soap was I decided to watch a few times and found out the language there was just as bad as what I heard at school. Of course I realized I was by that time reaching the top of the hill, so I decided I was not letting it get me down, but I decided there and then that I would never stoop to using such language myself.
Now that I’m over the hill I still hold true to that principle en funny enough the young whippersnappers seem to accept that from me too. We have agreed to disagree, so to speak and I realized there will always be a generation gap, which is as it should be.
I remember when I was about 15 my father was in his early 50s like I am now and he had ideas and did things I could never imagine me doing ever in my life. And so right I was. I still don’t do the things he did, even now that I am the same age as he was then, because whatever has happened in the meantime I am still of a different generation than he was at the time.
I’m wearing clothes my mum wouldn’t have wanted to be seen dead in and I will never ever wear the stuff she was wearing when she was my age. When I was younger I always had this terrible vision of having to end up like my mum, with tightly permed curls and good conservative clothes, which make you look like 110 even if you are still 50.
So when I look at my students and hear them talk their way nowadays, I just smile and remember how absolutely horrified my parents were when I used the word “shit” for the first time in my life. Of course, when my mum was watching The Towering Inferno and heard Steve McQueen say the same thing, she thought it was rather funny. Double standards no doubt, because she probably thought something like that was rather funny for a guy, but it was not at all ladylike.
Now when going to London with a group of fifteen year old students, like I do every year, it’s always very hard to bring it home to them that the things that are quite acceptable here in Holland are not done in England, well, at least not where my generation is concerned. For instance, here it is perfectly acceptable to shout out the word f*** at the slightest mishap (except I should add in my classroom) and every year it takes everything I got to persuade them not to use it once we cross the Channel. Every year I seem to succeed and they don’t use it (at least not when I’m present), but last year on our school trip the worst thing happened.
It was a drizzly Sunday afternoon and we had arranged to go to Camden Town to visit the markets, which is always a great experience to everyone. We usually give the students an hour or two to have a good look around before the coach returns and this time it was no different than any other year.
We instructed the students to stay together in small groups, hold on to their bags and not do anything we wouldn’t do and sent them off. We settled down in a noisy pub because anything is better than the hustle and bustle of a crowded market and awaited everyone’s return while enjoying a nice pint and a pub meal.
By five o’clock everyone started returning, the coach arrived on time and everything seemed to have been going without a glitch, until the last group of boys returned with the biggest one in the lead sporting an enormous grin.
“I have a new tattoo!” he grinned proudly.
At first I thought he was making a joke, thinking he had one of those stick-on things that come off in the shower, but then he pulled up the sleeve of his tee-shirt and I could see he had a real one, a big black letter “F”, for his favourite football club Feijenoord.
I got visions of livid parents coming to school bearing hatchets to decapitate every teacher they could lay their hands on and the only thing I could think of uttering was: “F*************!!!”
Suddenly the verbal generation gap was not so big anymore after all!
