Does This Text Make Me Look Fat?

I was in the same English class at the continuation high school for three days. Day one went pretty smoothly (for the continuation high school). Day 2 was a bit more difficult. It was a short day, their prom was that night, and they really weren't in the mood to work.

The assignment for the day was the reading an analysis of a poem called "To Christine". It was about girls and body image. And while the rest of the day getting anything out of them was like pulling teeth, one period we got a fascinating discussion going.

One boy told us he calls his girlfriend fat all the time.

One of the others at his table dug into that a little deeper, and I was able to discern that said girlfriend is pregnant. The boy claimed his girlfriend is not offended by his comments, and as I don't know the girl nor know how the comments are delivered, I can't be certain if he's truthful or lying to himself.

We said as much to him.

Suddenly, he started to wonder. Was his girlfriend upset and not telling him? He had to text her...

(Normally I'd be all about not texting in class, but under these circumstances...)

If you think about it, this is an awfully strange text to get out of the blue. According to the boy, she said she wasn't offended. Then he had to explain how this had all come up in class, in a class discussion.

I hope the two of them have a conversation about this later. I wonder at the girl. But then again, I wonder at people all the time.

Texting Habits of Today's Teens

It's been a while since I was last at the continuation high school. But classes are classes...

The topic of the day was texting. They read an article called "Is Texting Killing the English Language?" And I was given several discussion questions to go over before they had written questions to do.

I got the chance to kind of play anthropologist. How do teens text today? Several claimed that they don't text all that much. They call. I don't know if I believe that. Perhaps the texters were the ones not participating in the discussion.

But there were a few things that I learned about their texting habits:

• LOL is for girls. A couple guys claimed that they only use LMAO, and using LOL indicates a guy is not straight.
• ;) means something different to teens. I had heard this before elsewhere, so I didn't need them to spell out what it meant. Although, their reaction was enough to tell me that what I had heard was correct.
• Punctuation means they're upset. A period equals an exclamation point, basically.

One of the questions was "What abbreviations do you use?" I had hoped to get some new ones. Alas, the only one I was unfamiliar with was TFTI (thanks for the invite). (Oh, and SMO, for obvious reasons.) The others: SMH, GTFO, WTG, GTG. (A couple of these are NSFW.)

So, I make an awful anthropologist. Not a surprise, really.