::A Geek in Korea::

The finding acceptable seating for students in one of my mid-level classes is something akin to playing a game of chess. One student fights with another. Girls want to sit together, but only by age or elementary school. Other boys only study well together, or work better alone. I’ve gotten to assigning a few seats, then banning other combinations and letting the students figure out where that leaves them. Eventually I’m sure there will be some sort of combination found that lets everyone study in peace, but I have yet to find it.

One of the students in my class has only had a week with me. He was in other classes and got dumped into my level for the first time. He’s already been prohibited from sitting behind or next to the smallest boy in class because they get into fights constantly. This new boy isn’t making any friends in class, because he spent the entire class fighting again. The student fighting with him knows me and has been in my classes from the beginning of my teaching at this school.

My whole thing with boys fighting in class is this: If you aren’t distracting anyone else, and I don’t hear about it, beat the shit out of each other. I don’t care. The second someone else complains, or I have to hear you whining about who hit who, I’ll come down harsh like a hammer and you’ll wish all you had was a bruise from some student. This was my father’s discipline style, and it works.

Today class was going well. I’d see the two boys swinging at each other under the desk, but they weren’t causing much of a problem for each other.  I told them to stop, got ignored, then ignored them. Then when we were doing some other work, the boys started up again and I couldn’t teach. I had to stop and correct their behavior. Now they were getting me angry.

I asked one of the boys why he kept fighting with everyone in class. He started getting defensive about getting singled out and justified it by saying that the other boy had been punching him too. The problem is that every time he gets moved around class, he fights with someone else. No one was beating each other up in class before this boy showed up anyway.

For some reason, the boy got up. Somehow in the course of trying to either explaining the events, or pantomiming something, he took a swing at me. He grabbed me, pushed me, and gave me a punch in the side. I’m not happy when ten year old students act out their aggressions on me. I warned him, with the entire class watching, "Do not touch me again!" in Korean and English.

The boy stopped, grinned, then poked me with a finger. The entire class inhaled in, "Oh no he didn’t" sort of anticipation. I knew I had been challenged, even by someone a third my size and weight. Walk away from this, and I’d never have control of a level with these students in it again. The boy didn’t expect me to do anything, but like I said, he didn’t have me as a teacher for more than a week. When someone is challenging my control of a class in the first few weeks, I’m not a person to be messed with. 99% of my students know this, and he was just that last 1% to find out.

I took his hand, mock Hapkido style, and turned him around and marched him out the door. I gave him a nice "stay here. Don’t move." sort of command. I looked at the clock. I had about three minutes of class left. These students all ride a bus home. Either I disciplined the boy now before he missed his bus, or there is a good chance he might disappear before I could get him in front a Korean speaker.

Tactical decision, I let the other students go early. If this comes back to haunt me, with students asking to leave earlier, I’ll deal with it. Right now, I needed to get this boy under control.

I grabbed the nearest native speaker, my Director, who was in the meeting with a parent. Unfortunately, she couldn’t make time right way, so the boy got to stew for a few minutes on a bench and come up with a few nice excuses. The bell rang, the rest of the students were left out, and I grabbed another teacher to yell at the boy for me after I explained what he did. There was another bus departing in an hour, so the boy got to stay the entire time and get scolded. Score one for revenge!

The director talked to the boy after the teacher was finished with him, and he came to my class to apologize. He said he was misbehaving, and wasn’t listening. He claimed he thought I was playing around when I said, "Don’t touch me!" with a look of death in my eyes. Yeah, he isn’t a particularly bright student.

The parents were called as well, so it looks like everything in our power to deal with the situation has occurred. It seems the mother wasn’t very talkative other than saying, "Oh my, no! He shouldn’t do that!" We shall see if anything actually comes about from the disciplinary action we took. The Director said that she understands that for the first few weeks, being tough is okay to establish control. After that, she said, she expected the students to settle down. I sure hope so.