Thoughts On Realizing I'm Going To Be a Subject of My Student's Conversations Over Drinks In 20 Years.

This Friday puts a close on my first three weeks teaching at the Hogawon I moved from Boston to work at.  As the real teachers reading this will attest, teaching weeks seem to be like dog years: for every one week done you have experienced about seven years worth of trauma and joy.  In just this short amount of time my rookie-self has been face to face with the best and worst Nature has to offer us.  As a substitute teacher in Kentucky I thought I had seen kids at their very worst but finally being able to chart these children's lives, to see them everyday in their best and worst moods, to feel them cry and laugh, it shows me what little I know about myself and human nature in general, while at the same time, confirms everything I DO know with an almost thunderous applause.  

Here are the things that I have observed in my short time.

1. Kindergarden is a microcosm of society in general.  In kindergarden there is every single component and facet of the society that nurtures it miniaturized and compacted and expressed through the social interactions, needs, fears, and actions of the tiny women and men running around arguing over odd shaped blocks they name inappropriate labels like "telephone."  There are the leaders, the artists, the engineers, the grunts, the police-persons, the anarchists, the dreamers, the regimented, and the blindly faithful- all expressed serendipitously in the thoughtless actions of the creatures who embody them.  It makes me wonder if we are not pre-wired to be a certain way upon birth.  Or if perhaps the way in which we are raised, carrying forward from the way our parents were raised, in some way predisposes us to some important function in the great cog-wheel of society.  Yet in these nine children from another society I see the great universal truths that I have noticed in every single social setting I'd been able to observe and participate in my thirty-one years on this planet.  Some people, despite their age or their culture are just plain assholes.  Some people, despite said circumstances, are the anti-thesis of said assholes.  Like negative and positive magnetic forces, it's almost as though nature has a plan and for every bully there is a cop.  For every dreamer there is a humorless engineer mystified by the other's flightiness.  For every questioning philosopher there is a pragmatic "yes-man" more concerned with being left alone than understanding the reasons why.  All this is encapsulated in classroom eight on the sixth floor of the Gunjang Building in downtown Suji, and I am the lucky guy that gets to play God with these forces of nature and tell them to sit on their BUTTS with their FEET ON THE GROUND and OPEN THIER BOOKS to PAGE 13.  PLEASE!

2. Its not what you say, it's how you say it.  Never was a movie more accurate than that scene in Three Men and a Baby, but it couldn't be truer.  It's not what you say to them that matters as how much the delivery pierces through their defenses and lays a mark square on the ground zero of their own insecurities.  Most of the children I teach range from ages 7 (6 actually in Western aging) to 9 in my elementary classes (8 then, here you are counted as one years old the minute you're born since they count the time in the womb).  Therefore, despite their varying ranges of English level, which for the most part is staggering in a 6 year old, they are little little kids who make each other cry at the drop of a hat.  And over, to my senses having dealt with primarily adults these last odd 15 years, the stupidest things.  For example, one will start weeping, I'll go over, why are you crying?  "Bee'CUZ *sob* To-NY said I DO my homeWORK fAST and gOOD *choke, sob, choke* and..and..*sniff* and..my pEN is rED."  To which I think, logically, well what the holy hell is wrong with that?  You just received a COMPLIMENT kid, Tony is a freaking prick who writes like a stroke victim, enjoy it while you can.  Wait till the real problems hit like heartbreak and taxes.  But then again I have to realize, wait, these are children, and most importantly, as my brother Christian pointed out when little Cam came about, logic goes out the window with children and it's how Tony said it.  He made it sound like being smart and fastidious and possessing of a red pen was something to be ashamed of, and then I think back on when wearing a pair of Reeboks over Nikes was the ending of all existence and take a deep breath and tell the offender to apologize, NOW.  [Note:  In Korean, most of the stress in the words is placed on the second syllable or end of a sentence so when the kids get exited or are just learning how to speak English they tEND to strESS the seCOND syllaBLES a LOT.  This makes important matters of litigating between two waring six year olds over the matter of who possessed the "telephone" first an amazingly funny yet gravely serious event.]

I have little patience.  You know, before this job I thought I was one of the most liberal, patient, compassionate, caring men this side of Alan Alda but being around children for almost nine hours out of the day, with half of them being absolute bastards bent on hurting other kids by kicking and slapping and poking and pinching and demeaning, I have come in contact with my mean voice and it is a very, VERY loud and mean voice.  I do NOT suffer fools.  Despite the language barrier, despite them being young, despite the social difference, if I see a bully being a bully I will kick that kid out of my room and make them stand out in the hall for a half hour if need be without a moment's hesitation- a jerk is a jerk.  I think it's better to nip sociopathic tendencies in the bud then try to understand them at this point and a couple, not many, but a couple of the kids I govern are absolute jerks who, if they were older, would have facilitated a dust-up by now.  

Specifically, I will not tolerate meanness in my classes.  It's one thing to be so young you don't realize you're hurting someone else by just being unintentionally rude but if they start being sassy to me or others like imitating in a mocking way, or like I've seen too much of, actually kicking other kids in the shins or punching them when my back is turned, I do the 7 year old equivalent of putting them in the public square in chains as a deterrent.  I will call them out, point out what they're doing, then kick them out of the room, all without laying a hand on them, but somewhere this insanely scary voice comes out of me from the deep recesses of my soul and everyone's attention is arrested by it.  The guilty know who they are and strangely, despite what I thought would happen at first having wanted to be their friend and be "the cool guy," they LOVE me for it.  Every problem child I have had so far that I've yelled at and made to stand outside are the ones that bring me gifts everyday and do their work and wanna be the first to show it to me.  Machiavelli was right, it is so much better to be feared than loved cuz when I reward them with play gym, or play time, or stickers, or a compliment, the genuine excitement on their faces is breathtaking.  Their parents write me thank you notes already and give me care packages full of Tommy Hillfinger after-shave and muffins and the kids love to hug me goodbye and hello.  And the irony of yelling at them is that it's all just because I hate yelling in general, I don't tolerate conscious meanness, and I HATE bullies, no matter how old they are.  The way I see it, along with teaching them how to read and write, we're also teaching them how to get along successfully in society and a simple "may I borrow your eraser?" over a knock on the head and a quick grab are some of the most important lessons these kids need to learn along with pronouns and syntax right now.  Unfortunately, at this point, fear seems to be the only way to shake some of them out of the habit of being so vicious.  But just like anything in society, it's the few bad apples that outshine the rest and draw our focus, so, through team sticker systems and the lovely power of shame, I will take a sticker away from everyone when just one or a few of the bad kids act up and let the rest of the class yell at that kid till they shape up instead of having to do the hard work now.  This has been proving the most effective since I've established that Alan Teacher can be a scary guy if he has to be.  

So that's basically it for just three weeks.  I have learned a lot of things that I have been doing wrong.  The supervisors at my Hogawon range from flighty to very precise but all have given me great tips on my technique and rooms for improvement.  It's always a tough pill to swallow to hear what you're doing wrong but I'm mature enough to realize that I'm going to be what my teachers were to me when I was this age, either a source for warm memories or a reason to drink.  I do believe in quality over quantity and want the best for this kids, even the bad ones, because I understand that deep down all they want is attention.  

It's a rewarding job when, like today, one of the shin-kickers, Andy, not surprisingly one of the brightest kids in the class, after being called outside to the hallway, AGAIN, was able to say to me in perfect honesty after I asked him directly why he always had to hit people, "I don't know Teacher, I'm just so angry all the time.  I really don't want to be angry all the time."  Finally we were able to go back into the classroom and I explained that Andy doesn't mean to kick and hit, he can't control it and is sorry.  Let's all work together with him on this.  The other kids completely understood and the ones he hit even said it's okay, we're sorry if we made you so mad.  And I get paid to teach them how to read English.

Now, after three weeks, we finally have a start.