::A Geek in Korea::

Today my director was scheduled to go to an information meeting about owning a school. The meeting was canceled due to protests that blocked the entrance into whatever building the meeting was to be held. She still canceled her classes, but called parents instead. I had her class added to mine, so I had 15 hyperactive children in a large classroom.

The manner in which we break down levels in class means that students can study in the school for three terms before learning their first dedicated grammar lessons. These are the students I’m teaching now. They are on the cusp of moving up into where the school gets “tough” and starts actually teaching the finer points of grammar construction. The parents of the students in the level above them have said that the transition between levels would be easier if we did some basic sentence construction before they moved up to learning grammar. Now I have to do daily sentence testing.

This is fine, as the book we are doing tends to run very short. Adding a testing and checking period caused no problems. However, with double the number of students to test and check for the day, I was going to have some problems. I handed out the papers and wrote scrambled sentences on the board. It was the job of the students to recreate the sentences that had appeared in the unit we covered today. I didn’t have time to answer every single questions students had about the exercise. They knew what to do because we do this every week. Most of my students got to work right away.

The copying and writing portion of this exercise takes about five to ten minutes. All of the students, save one, had completed the entire test in that time. This boy had written nothing on his paper, and had poked his thumb through the middle of his test sheet. No time to waste, I collected all the papers, and redistributed them. One girl ended up with his blank paper. Lucky her.

After writing the answers on the board, the students checked the tests, then handed them back to me. I had the students checking answers write their names to prevent fraud, but since two sets of classes were together there were no problems save the boy that hadn’t written anything.

After the class,  I pulled him aside and asked him why he hadn’t written anything. Was the test too hard? Was someone in the other class making fun of him? He tends to be an immature and unpredictable boy, so I was worried someone had picked on him and he was too flustered to work. He simply put his hands up in an, “I have no idea what you mean” gesture.

After sitting him down on a wall, my director finally got off the phone to talk to the boy. I explained he hadn’t done anything in class, and wanted to know why he was behaving so strangely. He answered, to her, that he had no pencil, so he was absolved of doing any work for the day.

She asked him why he hadn’t asked me for a pencil. I had handed out several through the class, and students around him had something to write with too. He said that he didn’t have any pencil, so he shouldn’t have to do any work. He didn’t want to bother me because I was so busy.  He totally didn’t get why asking for a pencil was better than doing nothing the entire class.

She walked him out of the office and over his shoulder mentioned to me, “Sometimes, even he doesn’t know why he does the things he does. He’s just immature, and he has an emotional problem. Just let it go.”

I wasn’t too concerned. He wasn’t bothering anyone else, despite his talkative nature, so one more failed test won’t worry me much. Still, that’s a strange excuse.