Poor choice of words

All year, I've been dealing with students using a particular phrase in class that just drives me crazy: "Shut up." Students say it to each other all the time and, no matter how many times I get on them for it, they continue to use it. Finally, earlier this month, I told them that any time I heard them telling someone to "shut up" in my classroom, they would owe me a one-page paper on why it's disrespectful. If they did it twice, it was two pages, etc. I would refer to this essay as their "shut up paper," as in, "Don't forget to bring me your shut up paper tomorrow." (The "name" of these essays becomes important in just a moment...)

This has significantly cut down on the use of the phrase in my room, so I decided to implement the same strategy for another word that has begun cropping up: "gay" (as in, "that's gay," "you're gay," etc). Now yes, I use this phrase much more than I should, but not in the classroom, at least, and I want THEM to learn early on that using the phrase "gay" as a derogatory term is not acceptable. So today, after hearing a student bust out with that phrase, I told him that he owed me a page.

Towards the end of class, I noticed that this student was talking to a friend insted of working, so I said, "Stop talking and write your gay paper!" They DIED (I wasn't completely successful in keeping a straight face myself, to be honest).

Note to self: find a new name for THAT particular essay.