::A Geek in Korea::

My “socially promoted” student showed why he is the bottom of the barrel yet again today in a hilariously over the top manner. I was teaching the class he is supposed to be in, yet he hadn’t arrived at school today. I know some of the students go to the same school, and some of them know each other, so I casually asked if anyone knew anything about the whereabouts of the missing student.

One of the students mentioned he had seen the missing boy walking off with a friend, and had heard that they were going home to play together. The boy had remembered it because they were walking home the same time he was going to school to study. He wasn’t really ratting anyone out, just telling me what he had heard they were up to.

I passed this information on to the secretary when I turned in the attendence sheet. “Oh, a boy in class says that one of our students went to play games with his friends instead of coming here. I don’t know if it’s true, but the boy isn’t here today.”

The class was winding down with ten more minutes to go. I had explained the last part of the lesson, and was about to start reviewing and assigning homework when the socially promoted boy threw open the door.

“WHO SAID I WAS PLAYING A GAME!?! WHO!?”

He was shuttering and crying. It was pretty clear that the boy had run to the school, and that he had been severely scolded for skipping class. He wasn’t ashamed to admit he had been skipping school. He was angry that someone had said he was playing games with a friend while he was skipping school, which is swore wasn’t true. This seems like a trivial distinction to make, and since he was highly agitated, I had to wonder why he was so insistent. “I wasn’t playing games!” he repeated while he sank down in his chair, sobbing, covering his head in a book.

Whatever, you were still skipping class, dumbass.

The secretary came into the class, as she must have heard the violent eruption of tears when he ripped open the door. She told him, “Settle your problems during the break, this is study time, and you are late. Get your stuff together and get ready to write down the homework right now!”

I did my best not to laugh. I got the students to get their homework written down, then dismissed the class. The boy was still upset, and the two students who had a disagreement walked out of the room talking. The angry boy pulled the other boy into the bathroom and posted guards at the door, which means “fight”.

The other boy was slick enough to get out of his beating. He agreed to a different version of the story. He explained, at length, to the secretary, then to the other teachers, that he must have confused another boy who also goes to our school, but skipped, wearing the same clothes, said that he was going to play games instead of studying, and that he must have CONFUSED that COMPLETELY OTHER PERSON with his classmate. It was this ENTIRELY OTHER PERSON that looks EXACTLY like the boy that had skipped and played games, not the boy in his class, and that he was very sorry, and very wrong to have EVER implied otherwise.

This is SUCH the Korean solution to the problem. The cognitive dissonance was palpable.