I’ve got a class full of smart boys and girls that sometimes give me a few problems. There are a few students in the class that love to give me some backtalk and complain about homework from time to time.
Around two weeks ago, I had assigned something the loudest of the students told me was, “Too hard.” This would be a fair criticism if everything else in class wasn’t “too something” all the time. The student in question always looks for an excuse to complain, and I was getting pretty sick of his attitude. He said, “I hate doing homework, so I’m not going to do this because it’s hard and I don’t want to.”
I remember the conversation in particular because I wrote in my notes for a class, “Student was sarcastic and rude about homework.” I also took him out of class and had him talk to the head Korean teacher. That was my last time thinking about it.
The mother of the student in question came in today. I guess parents are getting calls from the Korean teachers, and this was the week where this particular class got a call. The woman came to the school with her children to defend him. She went to complain to the director and head teacher that whatever I was accusing the student of saying was untrue.
Yeah, I’m going to make something up about a student…why? I was in the office when the head teacher came in and explained the situation to me. This woman was furious I accused her son of being lazy and sarcastic in class. The other foreigner in the office just chuckled and basically seconded my assessment of the student.
I went out to make copies and this woman was outside talking to the director. She gave me this hurtful, wounded, “You’re the one, aren’t you! Why would you do this?!” look. It’s funny, because she was being very over dramatic about this. She actually was as dramatic as the boy could be when complaining about homework at times. Makes sense I guess.
The head teacher called in the student to ask him if he remembered the event. I told him he had said, “I don’t want to do it. I hate this.”
The boy claimed to have only complained about the difficulty of the work. He denied saying that he had used the word, “hate” at all. The head teacher went to work on him. She said that when she was talking to his mother, there had been even less wrongdoing on the boys part. It seems the boy has several versions of what happened, depending on how much sympathy he thinks he could get.
The head teacher told the student, “I told your mother the version that your teacher told me what happened. Go tell her the same thing so she believes us. I don’t like being called a liar.”
Yikes. I’m glad I wasn’t around for that. However, I’ve very glad that even with parents wanting to tear my eyes out, my coworkers have my back and believe me over students. Too bad we don’t have the recording to prove who was right.
Later, while I was looking for some classroom material, I found a list of “100 words every High School Students should know“. I’m only confident in my knowledge of 66% of the words, but I could probably pass a multiple choice test if I had to guess. How well would you do? Since I’m going to use this as teaching material, I’ll have to look up some words for class.
*(I hate studying. I’m not going to do it. Look at these words. They are too hard.)
