::A Geek in Korea::

The two boys in my Kindergarten class are very similiar in personality. So similiar in fact, that when one of them gets frustraited and starts making monkey sounds, the other one picks up the sound, much like a gibbon returning a call from it’s mate. This always gets higher and higher pitched  until all the girls in the class are sticking their fingers in their ears and I tell them to stop. There is very little children can do to annoy me faster than a high pitched wail for absolutely no reason.

Today, the two boys were particularly obnoxious. We were calling out words as I flipped over flash cards, but only they were screaming long after the word was revealed. No one else could learn anything since these two kids were screaming. I gave them a fair warning a few times, then asked them to stop one last time. When they continued, I grabbed both of their arms and took them outside.

The lesson I learned is that if you punish kindergarten students when they aren’t in the presence of their parents, it is completely ineffective. However, if parents, in front of their peers, sees their kid acting like an animal, you are very likely to get results very quickly. When I took these two students outside, I got two completely different reactions.

One student, seeing that he was already outside, and wasn’t going to play our game, decided the best course of action would be to stand next to the door where I asked him to wait for a few minutes. That way, while he wasn’t going to have any fun, he wasn’t going to get in more trouble from his mother. This is exactly what a smart student would do in this situation.

The other student proceeded to grab on every object he could to prevent himself from being removed from the classroom, got angry, started to cry, then began to hit me. I shut the door on him and saw a sort of wraith like shadow develop over him. I’m not sure, but it might of been his embarassed mother running at cheetah like speeds to quell the outburst of violence and tears.

From what the first student said when he was allowed back into class when he got a chance to settle down, the angry boy had not only hit me, but had also hit his mother. Whatever he had done, he was quickly taken down an abandoned hallway near the bathrooms and swiftly given a reminder about his behavior being innappropriate by his mother. The cries weren’t of anger any more, but of what I can only assume was a swollen ass.

When he returned after that, he went into "extra polite" mode. Not only was he trying his best to speak English, but he was using words like "Please" mutliple times per sentence to  make sure he didn’t get sent out again. I don’t bear any grudges, so I let him stay in class without penalty as long as he could behave. Later, I got an apology from his mother through my manager.

Since I don’t hit students for punishment, I can’t get that fearful respect that young children sometimes need to feel when they’ve done nothing but piss you off for a few hours a week. The amount of time I had to listen to that little boy scream this week was not made up for the fact he got punished by his mother today, but it didn’t make me unhappy either.