I have a low level class of pre-readers that don’t have a large vocabulary. One of the annoying things about teaching children with smaller vocabularies is that when they want to get your attention, they usually get up, grab your shirt, and yank you over to their desk pointing and grunting. This is not conductive to a class.
Before class even started today I was being touched, despite my numerous warnings. The boy in the class snuck up behind me while I was filling my mug with hot water. He gave me a big hug squeezing my middle and nearly got his hands burned off. This no touching ban works both ways. I don’t touch them, and they don’t get burned. It’s a win win.
All through class students were grunting and pointing, spelling out words in the air, and trying to get my attention through any non-verbal means possible. Since I’m trying to get them to SPEAK ENGLISH, part of my job is to act daft, even when I know what they want exactly, so that they challenge themselves to learn the vocabulary necessary. If you let students get away with poking and grunting, that’s all they will ever do.
I had turned around, writing something on the board. I heard the students talking to each other in Korean. One student said, “I’m going to poke his butt.”
The other one said, “Poke it HARD!”
Apparently playing daft for a long enough time had made the students think I was actually dumb not know about the butt-hole stab game. I turned around just in time, as a boy was staring at my ass with malicious intent, hand clapped and ready to stab his arms up to the wrists. Since this was the same boy hugging me and grabbing my shirt all day, I had enough. I had warned all five of the students in class multiple times about their behavior, and I had enough.
I sat him down, and got in his face.
“DO NOT TOUCH ME.”
Once in English, once more in Korean. “DO NOT, EVER, TOUCH ME. DO NOT TOUCH ME, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
One student whispered to the other, “I think he doesn’t want us to poke his ass anymore.”
Yeah, you THINK? It went a little past cute on the first day. This is two months into studying and you STILL don’t know how to act? Certainly the Korean teachers aren’t getting their clothes tugged on in class are they?
After the bell rang, I escorted the whole class to my director and explained the situation. She was aghast that I had to deal with children poking and grabbing me. I told her I thought it was because they had a low vocabulary and didn’t know how to get my attention. She laid into them pretty hard and let them know that this school was NOT a petting zoo. If I told the students “hands off”, that’s how it goes. No touching.
I’ll probably spend a few classes with some rules about classroom behavior being adjusted to before I get them to remember the lesson. Next time I’ll probably just start tossing students outside.
