::A Geek in Korea::

I have a class that spends most of the time ignoring me. It’s not that I don’t try, it’s just that their is an impenetrable wall of ignorance and stupidity surrounding this particular group of students that sit together in class. Seating charts are usually a method of crowd control of last resort, so while this class has been causing me problems, we haven’t split up these students through the class yet. There are also only two female students in the class, so there aren’t any real barriers to put up between the bad elementary school boys.

I was teaching class, writing something on the board, when I heard a squeal, a chair scoot forward, and a boy with his head down, crying. I turned around and gave a quick look at the crying boy. He didn’t tell me what was going on, but another student in his row told me why he was upset.

The boy behind him had stabbed him in the shoulder with a pencil, and his friend was laughing. I gave him a “What the hell!?” look, then walked out to grab my director. Children stabbing other children is far beyond what I’m willing to deal with in my class.

I pulled the director aside in the hallway and said, “I have a student that got stabbed with a pencil. I saw the mark on his shirt. It’s not bleeding, but it looked really bad.”

Remember the scene in A Christmas Story, where Ralph lies about where he heard a swear, and you can hear, “WHAT?!” and then the sounds of a child being beating furiously while the boy was asking, “What? What? What did I do…?”

The remainder of the class was something like that, except without the beating. You could hear the director yelling at the top of her lungs something indistinguishable, then the boy saying something, then “WHAT?!?!” over and over again. It was great.

The story that eventually emerged was that the stabee was leaning his chair back and resting it on the stabber’s desk. The stabber kept pushing the boy’s chair off his table, and eventually just brought the pencil down on the boy’s shoulder to prove a point. That was the motive. When asked why he would do that instead of just pulling his desk back since he was in the last row, the stabber just shrugged his shoulders. “Just because.”

Crazy.

I’ve had several behavioral problems with this student before, but usually he is content to just sit by himself and be bored. Now he has other people in class as stupid as he is so he has to show how tough he is to the rest of the morons in the class. I’m not looking forward to seeing him back in class, but he’ll be sitting in the front row from now on, prime backhand territory if he tries anything with a pencil and me.

I’ll issue him a warning the first time I see him back in class next week.