Grab bag

A drunk man came to school the other day.  He is the 41 year old cousin of a boy at our school.  The boy is not a popular boy.  He sometimes runs around the classroom for no reason and attacks the blackboard with chalk.  He doesn't play well with others I hear.  I don't teach him, alas.  So his older cousin got drunk sometime before 12:30 on a Tuesday and came to school with the goal of going to his homeroom class and telling all the children not to pick on him.  Now this man I understand.  You get drunk a few days in a row before noon and you start to question what goodness you are bringing to the world.  You little cousin sneaks you a beer that night because he's too young for his parents to include him in the serious family discussion about your alcohol abuse and you start to feel like maybe he needs somebody in his corner.  When you're making your way through your rice and rice-wine at  9:40 in the morning and it is the time to make plans, turn things around and start to leave your mark in the lives of the people who enable you.  I get it.

A woman pulled out and hit a kid on its way to the elementary school beside my middle school.  I'm not trying to be crass, I just heard the the kid referred to as 'he' and 'she' from different people telling me the story.  I was unfortunately on time for school and so missed being a witness.  I would tell you that the kid is fine, but I actually have no idea.  The order of events went like this: Woman hits kid, kid falls down, woman screams (in car), woman screams (out of car), woman hauls kid to its feet and then into her car.  Woman drives off. I'm going to be honest and tell you I don't understand this one at all.

And finally, sometimes we do good work around here.  Sometimes I get called in to do a class last minute, but the computer is broken by the kids so I'm sent back to my desk, but the computer is fixed by the kids so I'm called back, but the computer's sound doesn't work so I hang out while the kids try to fix it and eventually the tech guy comes by and fixes it in three seconds and we watch 9 minutes of hilarious sitcom 'Community' and the bell goes and I wish them good luck on their exams.  Lately it's one or the other.

In case you ever wondered what really happense

At school, I am on a 'need to know basis', not by virtue of the heavy classification that that the photocopier password falls under, but because it takes almost more time than anyone can afford just to explain the things that are extremely relevant to me on a day to day basis.  So never mind the little things, the asides, the office jokes, the latest gossip.  That just doesn't make it to my ears.

Do you already see the exception coming?  Yes?  Let me fill you in then.

When the lunch bell goes I wait an extra ten minutes to head down, mostly because bells aren't the boss of me.  Wednesday I was broken from the dead stare at my computer by the head teacher suggesting very much that I head down to eat.  It takes only a minute to zero in on the art teacher crying at her desk.  The other female teachers are assuming stress relieving positions and I do not need a Korean vocabulary larger than 35 words to know that 'you should go eat lunch' means 'you should not watch this teacher cry.'  I make vamoose into my middle name, Vamoose.

Lately at school, there has been a discipline problem.

And as these things work, on the way back from lunch my favourite Nice Man P.E. teacher begins to give me the lay of the land these days as he sees it.

Whatever institution decides these sorts of things has decided that hitting kids is now illegal, both with foreign objects and the human body.  That means no sticks, folding chairs, tazers, elbows or ear pulls.  This is one of those things that I knew was true some places, but didn't know if it had been applied like a heavy blanket over the peninsula or if they were "just talking about Seoul".  Now unless you are the one person who google analytics tells me reads this blog from somewhere in the Balkans, you probably are on board with the 'no hitting' thing. (Sorry to my one reader in the Balkans, I have made a joke at your expense with no real idea of how often/hard/creative you are in your corporal punishment.)  Put that aside for a moment.  Basically what has happened is that the traditional form of classroom discipline has been cast away and there is nothing to replace it.  There is so much nothing to replace it that last week there was a meeting to talk about insituting a new form of punishment for the students.  The meeting found that officially no one has any idea.

So the proffessional teacher with  more than a decade's worth of experience asked me: how can we discipline students?  I laid out how things were done back in my day as best I could and while he was very inerested he brought up a few reasons why he thought it just wouldn't fly over here.

Lots of kids go to academies or cram schools after they're done at school.  You can't make kids stay after school because if they miss these acadamies their parents get ulta pissed and complain to the school.

Parents work a lot and they work late.  This may translate to any or all of the above: a. they don't have a lot of time to talk to their kids.  b. they don't know how their kids are behaving in school c. they don't have time for parent-teacher conferences (which I suggested)

Parents are having only one or two kids, where as it used to be the norm to have many more.  He lamented the unwillingness for parents these days to believe that their child would behave badly.  He feels that children are coddled much more than they used to be.

Everything he said I had heard said before.  Just never all at once.  So it seems plausible that this is one of the ways things are.  But I have to admit now that I have grown uncomfortable talking with way, without making anything up or even embelleshing.  I am reminded why I leave the straight facts to others.  So you'll have to forgive me if I duck out early.

With Summer comes

It was hard to decide whether to stay or go at the end of my contract last year.  In the days after I made my decision it was this time of the year that I thought of, the Summer days.  The beautiful, cloudless, endless, humiliating, shirt-pooling summer days.  They're here again.

Between one and two in the afternoon when it crests at thirty-something degrees and holds itself there with near complete humidity it is difficult to be.  My shorts soak through under me at my desk.  In the classroom I weave and steal things from the children to try and keep my brain occupied instead of sludging down the back of my neck and away.  I do not begrudge them their head down, sweat staining my handout about how to give advice.  Here is some advice kids: fake a tumor until the Fall.  Nothing will be taught except how to pit-stain.

At 7pm when soccer begins tonight it's barely broken.  After a half hour of running my body wants to quit so badly that it feels as though I'm having to will my bladder to hold itself.  This is entirely expected.  It was the same last Summer. 

The heat is only beginning.  A barely intrepid thirty-one today but we'll see forty* sure enough.  My icecream habit puts children through college and me on a fast track to diabetes. And with the heat comes the bugs.  What does the small moth watch me approach, allow me within nearly an inch before perhaps deciding to flutter away without any hint of need, while the Mosquito darts and hides in my apartment with a guerilla instinct that would shame the Viet Cong?  It is because we are at war with the Mosquito, and they have never known another Summer.  Each one was bred* only to win this single season.  To steal my sleep and force me to see the room go bright while the buzz my ears.  I hate them and when I kill one in the last part of what should be my night's sleep, I curse them and their mothers and their fathers and their sisters who will come after them with my voice and not quietly.  I leave their bodies in the wall and in the cieling, little notes that are never read by my enemies.  Then I go back to bed and fall a-sweat.

*denoting edits by some asshole I know.