::A Geek in Korea::

In my incredibly large class of noisy students, a series of decrees from the director has brought most of the students behavior in line. Mostly. I’ve also been altering my classroom style to try to get the students more active in class, but little did I know that even greater participation sometimes has a downside when strange children are involved.

We were doing a dictation lesson with homophones that required the students to pick the correct word from context clues. “Please smell the beautiful: Flour / Flower. Circle one,” sort of thing. Since telling the student which answers isn’t going to work, I told the students that people that had the correct answer could come up and write the answer on the board for everyone else to see.

Several girls hands shot up, and the boy who vomits in his mouth about getting test questions wrong also volunteered. While I was confident that even Test Anxiety Boy could get all these questions correct 100%, I didn’t want to risk him being embarrassed by making a mistake and having a full stage, front of class mental breakdown. Who knows what would happen if everyone could see him get a question wrong. I chose the girls that volunteered, then told people that they would have a chance to participate at the board later in class.

This angers the little boy, as he wanted to show off in front of everyone. Test Anxiety Boy starts up on his “Freak out”© routine that is so familiar now that he owns several trademarks and copyrights regarding the exact nuance of it’s execution. There is the high pitched whine, followed by incomprehensible gibberish, then tears. This is followed by huffing, and in a new twist, doubling over and hiding his head under the desk. Little did I know that the doubling over was a reflexive means of protecting himself from the vomit he then preparing to spew.

The boy now vomits in class when he doesn’t get called on for things he wants to do. Lucky for me he only had a light lunch. He was escorted out of class by a far kinder student than I would have been if a boy had vomited in the seat in front of me in class. He grabbed some tissues while he was out of class and came back to clean up his mess while I did my best to prevent a riot. I do not get paid enough to handle sanitation of that sort, and if you’ve got a twitchy vomit reflex, cleaning up your own mess is something you need to accept and do without question.

Judging by their reactions, the rest of the class confused vomit with EBOLA virus (common mistake) and was almost clawing at the door to get out of the room, as if this boys neurosis was going to infect them all. I settled them down, and to my credit, finished the lecture while the boy handled the mess.

Other than the vomit, it was one of the better classes with them this month. (Shrug)