One of my more annoying students has been getting on the nerves of all the teachers recently. He will do things just to piss us off over and over again. Today, before my class started, he managed to anger the head teacher by making dumb noises in class. She brought him into the office to explain himself, as he was making sounds all the time in her class.
The boy is a masterful actor, and can turn on and off the tears at will. While she was lecturing him, he started weeping. She stopped and asked him what was going on. He said that he was afraid of her, and that she was probably going to hit him. Our head teacher denied that she would have hit him, but he had gotten her on the defensive. He might be a somewhat poor student, but he isn’t dumb.
During my class the next hour, I had to warn him about making sounds a few times, but told him that tears weren’t going to work on me. I had seen through his act. I wasn’t going to get fooled by his little game.
When it came time to write homework on the board, the boy shouted he wouldn’t be attending the academy next week. He was beaming with joy. I did the same thing I always do when students tell me that they would be in class in advance. I told everyone else we would have a huge party to celebrate their departure. I’m always very sarcastic about it.
I asked him why he wasn’t going to be at school, and he said that he would be in the hospital. He had some kind of surgery scheduled. Of all the things he could have said, this had to be his reason. I had to give the boy credit. He was good at making his teachers feel sorry for him. I asked him if it was a serious surgery, what was wrong, if he was sick, and how long he would be gone.
He was completely oblivious to any of the details. He said he had forgotten what his parents had told him. He didn’t know why he was going in, or what was wrong with him. The less he knew, the worse I felt. Why else would his parents keep details of a surgery from their children? It must have been some sort of serious surgery. He was still very happy about it all, and was looking forward to not coming to class. I wished him luck when he went home, then went into the teacher’s room to find out what was going on. If someone was going to miss class, the head teacher would know why.
"Do you know why that boy is going to miss next week’s class? He said he had surgery and would be in the hospital. Why? What’s wrong with him? Will he be okay?"
"Oh yeah," my head teacher responded, "he’s getting circumcised."
Somehow I think he’ll be wishing he never missed school after his surgery.
