Teaching styles and little pieces of paper

I don't think I have ever written an article on this blog about teaching English, which is not bad for four years of blogging :)
 So I am writing this blog update with trepidation.... will it unleash a flood of ELT themed pieces? I very much doubt it :)

Today's topic is just a short piece about teaching styles. Several years ago I was like many new teachers, earnestly cutting up pieces of paper and preparing activities for my students. However with time my methods have changed. I guess this has something to do with the humanist in me. I see these pieces of paper getting screwed up or left on the desk at the end of the lesson and think - what's the point? Also of course I'm just bone-ass lazy.

I have developed a cabaret-act routine where gramma points and vocabulary are interlaced with a 90min spiel of bizarre quirky observations and anecdotes. I feel happy if I can give a humorous story to each definition I give: It keeps me entertained and hopefully means they remember it.

Okay, so now you have the picture, you will understand my pride when, during a particularly surreal exchange between myself and one student, another remarked in Polish that this was like Monty Python. The first student was a soldier and I have always found (being an ex-squaddie) that soldiers the world over have the same sense of humour: usually dark and sick. We were therefore having a bizarre exchange about the rules of engagement in the Polish military. He said he was allowed to shoot a rapist. I was surprised how detailed their R-O-E card is (in fact a fat great book) and thought that surely you could just pull the bloke off and cuff him; therefore I said how killing him seemed extreme seeing as there is no capital punishment here. He said that he could not actually kill him. To which I replied "So what? You just shoot him in the testicles?"

The above exchange was accompanied by a story of how a colleague beat-up a mentally disabled guy for running through a military compound. I of course remarked how this was like beating up a child. He retorted that the man was trying to steal the soldier's gun, to which I ridiculed him and his big brave colleague further.

The point of this? Not sure there is really any point. It may be a cruel power need I have, It may be a lack of empathy induced by being dropped as a baby. Yet I can't help being sarcastic and ironical to my students. Is this wrong? ...  Probably. but they seem to like me for it. I accept as good as I get, but take this as a challenge for a duel of wits.