Oh My Lady whatnow?

During a particularly rowdy night class yesterday, I was moved to throw up my hands and say, "Oh my god!" at their antics.

To which, a student named Jim (who fervently aspires to "be Michael Jackson" when he grows up)  replied solemnly, "No, teacher, you should say, 'Oh my lady GaGa.'"

Umm ... what?

Let's pass over the fact that these robe-wearing, grassland-yodeling kids, whose cultural knowledge of the world beyond the borders of China has heretofore appeared to begin and end with Michael Jackson, and perhaps a dash of Kobe Bryant, apparently know all about Lady GaGa.  Is this an actual thing that people say? (Google assures me it is. In fact, apparently the doyenne of difference is a cultural phenomenon in China. Which is weird for a country that barely tolerates, much less celebrates, individuality.)

Other highlights this week: 

An impromptu sex ed discussion during morning class left the girls with their heads buried on their desks, and the boys rolling on the floor with laughter while I had to pause class to look up the Chinese word for "condom."  (All precipitated by an extremely unhelpful reading passage in their books about the AIDS epidemic, and once you start explaining what "unprotected sex" means, it's a bleak downward spiral that ends with you pantomiming a pregnant belly and insisting that this is no laughing matter.)

The whole point of not having kids was so I could avoid days like this.