A Mind Out of Balance

Part One 

* We Meet Patrick *  His Background Presents Challenges * Things Get Unpleasant Quickly *

Patrick had a file that followed him around from school to school like a shadow. He was just entering the ninth grade, a good looking young man with a winning smile on his face, braids on his head, and nice new clothes on his body every single day of the week. From the looks of him, he was pleasant, nonthreatening. I was handed his file during the first week of school and told that I had been assigned as his case manager. I would see Patrick daily in English class, where the school had scheduled me, the Robin to the English teacher’s Batman, a co-taught classroom for a mixed group of students, some deemed normal, others who were said to need more help, like Patrick.

Sounds good, I told my department chair. I wrote up a brief letter about myself (I had his file, why not give him something on me), and stuck it in a folder, along with a contact sheet for the parent to fill out and return. Any time I was assigned a new student, I’d always meet with the kid right away, introduce myself. I went up to Patrick before class and knelt down by his desk. I shook his hand and handed him the folder. He took it, very nonchalantly, and threw it on the floor.

“I don’t need that bullshit,” he said. I looked at the folder and then told him to pick it up. He told me to fuck off. I put the folder back on his desk and said, in a rather loud voice, “Is this how you want to start? Because I’m your Case Manager and I’m here to help you.” Patrick took the folder, laughed, and threw it back on the floor by my feet.

After class, Ms. Bacon, the English teacher, approached me. “You shouldn’t have done that in front of the class. It might have really embarrassed him.”

I hated to say it, but she was right. I lost my cool a little bit. In the three years I’d been doing this, I’d never had a first hello go so badly. Patrick’s file should’ve been a warning. It painted a very different picture from the person I’d seen the first day of school. He’d been a major behavior problem for ages. Patrick qualified as a special education student, under the category of “Behavioral and Emotionally Disabled.” His intelligence was no better or worse than any other kid, but he’d failed the bulk of his previous classes. He’d been sent to an alternative school multiple times, the school for kids who didn’t fit in. The screw ups. Bad Boy School. In fact, the only way he got to high school in the first place was by passing his classes there, at the alternative school, and everyone knew how that went. They passed everybody. Some of my kids in the past would go and do crazy shit on purpose, wanting to get sent there because it was the only way they wouldn’t fail their grade.

But no worries. Didn’t matter, stay confident. I was young, hip…of course I could connect with him. (This is the part where I show how naïve I was. It’s foreshadowing, and it means that I’m going to fail miserably.)

Patrick had me pegged from the start. He saw me as his enemy. One time, I was in front of the class, teaching a lesson, and he started laughing loudly. “Nobody in here respects you!” he called out. “We’re not listening to you.”

“Can you please be quiet, Patrick.”

“Fuck you. Nobody gives a fuck about that shit coming out of your mouth.”

I told him to leave the room. I didn’t know what else to do. I had a class of 35 kids and didn’t want them to start looking at me like a doormat. Afterwards I tried to talk to him. He never made eye contact and laughed the entire time.

“Nobody respects you,” he just kept repeating it, over and over.

Sadly, that was about as good as things were to get.

*

Part Two

We Meet Patrick’s Mother * Patrick Finds a Supportive Teacher * Behavior Problems Lead to Trouble at School * The Past Is Either Enlightening or Just Plain Depressing

Nearly every day, Patrick did something bad. Or multiple things. He was failing all his classes miserably, refusing to do any of the assignments, disrupting them, skipping them from time to time. His Creative Writing teacher, a pretty African-American woman named Dana, couldn’t stand him. He was vulgar, disrespectful. She’d been cursed out one too many times by him and was sick of it. Patrick had also decided that it was him against his World History class. That teacher didn’t know what to do with him either. He’d formed a one man alliance against the other boys in class, angry and aggressive, and it seemed like only a matter of time before things got violent.

I was concerned, and so I did what seemed logical. I called his mama.

His mother was unbelievably nice. Absurdly friendly, an angel. To be honest, she wasn’t what I expected. In fact, I might say that his mother was the nicest parent I’d ever worked with. Patrick’s father was mostly out of the picture, having moved to Ohio. He’d call, keep in touch. Patrick wanted to go live with with his dad, and was mad that he couldn’t. He told his mom constantly that he didn’t want to be there, with her. And she had lost control of him. He’d joined a gang and would stay out through the evening and into the night. Some days she’d barely see him. Other days he’d be there, at home, treating his mother the same way he treated Dana the Creative Writing teacher. It wasn’t pleasant.

About a month went by, maybe more, and the only person at the school who seemed unfazed by him was Ms. Bacon, the English teacher. She was white, in her forties, and her husband made a lot of money, so she was a bit different than the other teachers, who were generally young and broke. Ms. Bacon had a very kind heart and treated her students like they were her own kids. Always giving them rewards, candy, baking for them. On test days, she’d help students work through questions because she thought bad test scores didn’t do anything but hurt self-esteem. She didn’t follow school rules and allowed her students to use their cell phones and Ipods in class. This kind of leniency carried over to how she dealt with Patrick.

“Good morning, Patrick!” she’d say enthusiastically as he walked into class fifteen minutes late. “What would you like to do today?”

“Man, Miss Bacon, I can’t be doing this work. Can I get on your computer?”

“Of course, Patrick. Have a seat!”

She’d go and log him onto her computer, and he’d surf the Internet or play video games, listening to his MP3 player, while the rest of the class participated in the lesson, often glancing over at Patrick enviously. Ms. Bacon said that it was important for Patrick to feel safe, unthreatened. Create the right environment, and eventually he would come around.

As for Patrick himself, his gang affiliation became the thing he was most proud of. He’d brag about it. He started calling himself ‘Lil Pat’ and offering both his teachers and his classmates helpful assistance. “Yo, you ever end up in the hood, your car breaks down or something, and people start fucking with you, tell ‘em you know Lil Pat. They know me. They’ll leave you alone.”

The offer didn’t extend to me. “Yeah, fuck you Mr. P. Stop calling my mama. She don’t know nothing. If I see you in my hood, I’ll cap your ass.”

So, I wasn’t really connecting with him the way I’d hoped to. And things kept getting worse and worse. He got suspended for cursing at school staff. Then, when he came back, he beat the shit out of a boy in World History class. Suspended again. Because he was a special education student, by law the school couldn’t suspend him more than 10 days for the entire school year. Check that – they could, as long as we had a meeting about it (called a “manifestation determination”). Patrick would skip two classes a day and then the school would suspend him again, which meant his mother had to come in and we’d all sit down at a big table, me, mom, the head of the special ed department, his teachers, and the vice principal. We’d all discuss what the hell we were going to do with him and then sign off on paperwork, which allowed the school to legally suspend him some more.

The big question, one he wouldn’t answer, was where he was going when he skipped class. Nobody knew. What was he doing? Was he off in the woods, drinking and smoking? Was he wandering around the hallways or chilling with his gang buddies? It was a mystery, until one day I went to ask Ms. Bacon something and found Patrick in her classroom, on the computer.

“Wait, you mean he’s been with you?” I asked. “He’s supposed to be in Creative Writing.”

“Well, that teacher hasn’t done anything but make him feel unwanted,” she said. “He can’t succeed in an environment like that.”

Patrick glared at me from over the computer monitor. Beams of hatred shot from his eyes. I’d caught on to what was happening, discovered his secret hiding place.

Not that I knew what to do next. We all wanted Patrick to feel loved and to have someone to go to. Ms. Bacon was clearly that person. At the same time, she seemed to demand nothing from him and it was contrasting badly with his other teachers. It was tough to say if she was helping or enabling.

While Patrick and I weren’t getting along, his mother and I were becoming best friends. We talked on the phone all the time. I guess I was providing for her the kind of support I was supposed to be providing her son. “He’s my baby,” she told me. “I’ll always do my best to love him. I know I did him wrong before.” Then she told me about all her guilt. She was drinking heavily when she was pregnant with him. Did a lot of drugs. An addict. It took her years to put herself together, and she would pray that it wasn’t too late. She was finally ready to be a mother, and it hurt her inside, so badly, knowing what she’d put him through.

Another month had gone by. Patrick would sit in the back of the classroom, his eyes directed at me. He’d make a gun with his fingers, aiming at my head, pulling the trigger and yelling BLAM! Over and over again, spraying me with invisible bullets. It was a bit jarring.

I played cool. I wanted to help him, but he was killing me.

*

Part Three

Patrick Gets Locked Up * A Decision Is Made * Drama Unfolds * The System Fails * Patrick Now * Closing Thoughts

Patrick got arrested around the end of the first semester. No one was surprised. He was being held at the prison and his mother wasn’t bailing him out. I didn’t know exactly what happened, but it had something to do with her. He’d lashed out and ended up in handcuffs with an assault charge. While he was locked up, his teachers experienced what is definitely the greatest source of guilt any educator can go through: that sense of relief one gets when the student from hell isn’t around any more.

Hey, we’re not supposed to have favorites, let alone least favorites.

In the month leading up to his arrest, I’d been under a great deal of pressure to do something about him. The school had absolutely had enough. Administration was fed up. I sat down with my department chair and talked about options. Nothing in his current IEP was working. We had one essential question to start with: Can this boy function in a regular school setting? He couldn’t go a week without getting suspended, was going to fail all his classes miserably…what chance did he have of eventually graduating high school? He had so many needs, was our school even equipped to deal with them?

Our talks ended up including administration, his teachers, and his mother. At the end of the discussions, we came to the conclusion that the best we could do for him would be to place him in a separate classroom specifically for boys with emotional disabilities. He would stay with one teacher all day, in one classroom, occasionally transitioning with his teacher to go to electives and lunch. There would be assistants in there with him. All of his academic work would be delivered in this setting, and there would be minimal distractions. He would never be without supervision.

To some this might sound like help. A solution. To Patrick, it was just another version of prison.

The only thing he liked about the idea was that it meant he’d have to be transferred to a different school. He’d be going from our school (low income, gang problems, rated badly by the school system, graffiti of a penis drawn across the door of the teacher’s restroom), across town to the more hoity-toity high school (higher income, kids on honor roll instead of in gangs, rated very highly by the school system, if penis drawn on door they washed it off as opposed to leaving it there for two years). We’d be sending him to the kind of school all parents want their kid enrolled in. So, in essence, yes, we were kicking him out of our school, but since he was getting booted over to a better school, it was okay.

At least that’s what I told his mother. I said that this move would help him, both with his grades and in dealing with his problems. She was so sick of hearing from the school at this point, she would’ve signed off on anything.

But we couldn’t simply send him off. A school doesn’t have that kind of power. Only the people from the school district had that authority, and so we would have to present our case to them and hope they ruled in our favor. Thus I started collecting documentation on Patrick’s behavior. His teachers would write a report after every class, detailing what work he refused to do and what kind of language he used and anything else that demonstrated he didn’t belong. Administration kept meticulous paperwork of all the suspensions, and I photocopied all of his past mess-ups from his folder (fights in middle school, being sent to the alternative education program). I ended up with an enormous binder, full of damning evidence. The thing was the size of a microwave oven; I seriously felt like I was Eliot Ness trying to take down Capone.

One night, near the end, Patrick’s mother went to the courthouse because there was some kind of hearing regarding the arrest. We still talked on the phone a lot, but I never asked her too much about the entire situation. It was none of my business. I wasn’t even sure where Patrick was staying. Anyways, the night of the hearing, his mother called me in tears. I’d never heard her like this. She was extremely upset, enraged. “I’ve been robbed!” she said. “They took everything! My TV, all my jewelry…everything!”

“Wow, I’m so sorry to hear that…”

“It was him,” she said. “At the hearing, he kept looking at me and laughing. Had this big motherfuckin’ smirk on his face. I know what he did. He told all his little gang friends that I wouldn’t be home. He knew what time, how long it would take…he did this.”

“Well…we don’t know…”

“Oh I fucking know damn well he did! He set me up! That’s why he was all smiling at me. I can’t fucking take this shit anymore! I got my gun and I’m waiting for him. I swear to God, Mr. P, if that boy comes around here tonight, I’m gonna shoot him. I don’t give a fuck if he is my son.”

“Okay, calm down. Please promise me you’re not going to do that…”

I didn’t talk with her much longer, and I didn’t do anything afterwards. Thought about calling the cops. Didn’t. I’d spend enough time with her, in my heart I really didn’t believe that she would go through with it and actually shoot him.

Thankfully, Patrick never returned to the house that night, so we’ll never know if she would have or not.

About a week later, the woman from the school district came for our kick-Patrick-out meeting. Everybody was there, a big party, mom was back, I was there, Ms. Bacon, the vice principle…everyone except for Patrick. He was sitting outside the school on a bench. His mother and I went out to see him. “Patrick, come on now, we’re about to have your meeting about going to the new school,” his mother said. “Don’t you want to be there? It’s about you…your future.”

He didn’t look at either of us. “Nah, I don’t care,” he said. He kept looking down at his feet. Didn’t say anything else, just kept sitting there, thinking.

And that was it. Well, kind of. The papers were signed and he was off. I had to go to the new school and meet with the teachers who would inherit him, the ones who taught the self-contained class for boys with emotional disabilities. They leafed through the colossal Al Capone binder. One of the teachers shook his head. “I don’t know how we can handle another one,” he said. “Today we had a kid throwing desks across the room. It’s a nightmare in here.”

“Well, he doesn’t throw desks,” I said, trying to sound encouraging.

Three days later, I got another call from Patrick’s mother, and again she was furious. The difference was, she wasn’t angry with Patrick this time. She was angry with me. “You lied to me Mr. P!” she shouted over the phone. “What happened? Explain to me what happened?”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

She kept on. “You said you were gonna help him! How is this helping him? He’s right back where he started! This ain’t right! You all lied to me, and you lied to him!”

Later on I found out why she was so upset. Three days at the new hoity-toity school, and they kicked him out. Gone. He was sent back to the alternative learning program where he had finished his last year of middle school.

“Wait,” I said to my department chair, “I’m baffled. How can they do that? You’re telling me that they got the school district to approve something that said Patrick was too emotionally disabled to be in the classroom for boys who are emotionally disabled?”

“Yup,” she said. “Technically, it says that his behavior doesn’t stem from his disability, and he doesn’t belong there.”

“But it took me two months to compile all that paperwork to get him put in a separate classroom. Three days and they got someone to reverse all that? How could it take me two months and them three days?”

“Because we are who we are, and they are who they are. All that principal had to do was make a phone call.”

In all my years of teaching, Patrick remains, without question, my biggest failure.

Before I wrote this, I looked Patrick up on Google, curious as to what happened to him. I learned that this past year, 2012, Patrick was arrested 4 times. Larceny. Stalking. Assault on a female. Assault by strangulation. Assault and battery 3^rd degree. Some other charges. He’s an adult now. He looks a lot different from when I first saw him, with his smile and his new school clothes, all those years ago.

* If Patrick’s story is meant to illustrate anything, it’s that we have a very confused system in place right now for dealing with young people suffering from mental health problems. In this (true) story, a lot of people tried to help Patrick and nothing worked. Nothing. Patrick is an example of a person who walked through the system, waving red flags, and came out the other end of it unchanged. In the wake of the recent tragedy in Connecticut, mental health issues are at the forefront of the conversation. What we absolutely don’t need is vague support in the shape of more money, increased medication, and an acceptance of thought policing that further isolates troubled individuals. Basically, we don’t need more of what we already have. We need real ideas, policies, and plans to be developed by professionals and put to use in our schools and by parents who don’t know where to start. And I think it’s important to look at stories like this one and ask, what could we have done? There are a lot of Patrick’s out there. How do we help people who do whatever they can to reject that help? I wish I had answers, but I don’t.

Whew! Thanks anyone who read that whole thing. Cheers and God bless from Topiclessbar.  : )

*

 

Generation Glue Stick

Title: Generation Glue Stick

Main Idea: How the invention of the glue stick has changed an entire generation of young people.

Introduction: If Laura wasn’t so adorable, she might be mistaken for a brat. It would be an understandable mistake. Laura is nine years old, wears nice little dresses and bursts into laughter a lot. She could be the poster child for cute children. She could also be the poster child for COCD – Childhood Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Give Laura the colored pencils to color with and she will have a fit (she prefers the markers). Hand Laura the scissors with the red handle and she will refuse to use them (she will only use the scissors with the blue handle). Grade her paper by putting a smile face next to the right answers, and she will remove them with White Out (correct answers, obviously, are scored with hearts). The thing is, Laura isn’t the only one with COCD. Most of the kids I work with have it to some degree. It’s not a new phenomenon – kids have always been stubborn – but it’s getting worse. Why, you ask? Perhaps it began with but one small invention, the glue stick.

Body Paragraph #1: Way back in 1969, a German company named Henkel had a bright idea. They studied lipstick and noted how remarkably easy the ‘twist-up’ applicator was to use. What if, they asked themselves, other items could be created in lipstick’s image? Henkel decided that glue would be an ideal candidate and soon after introduced “The Pritt Stick,” the first incarnation of the modern glue stick. Only three years later, Pritt Sticks were being sold in 38 countries. By 2001, that number climbed to 121. But while the bright idea of creating a glue applicator modeled after lipstick came originally from Henkel, another company piggy-backed it with a bright idea of its own. The Elmer’s Company, who used a cartoon figure named Elmer the Bull as their mascot, had the brilliant notion of sticking the word ‘school’ in the name of their products. This worked wonders. Schools always needed cheap crafting products, and Elmer’s jumped all over that. Elmer’s products such ‘School Glue,’ ‘Krazy Glue,’ and the ‘X-Acto Knife’ became ubiquitous in schools all over America. The focus of Elmer’s advertising is still squarely placed on educators and students; go to their website today, and you will find a feature entitled ‘The 1^st Day of School’ filling their homepage, with side links for parents and teachers.

Body Paragraph #2: So what does any of this mean? I argue that through the advancement in the quality of products (The Pritt Stick, for instance) and their widespread usage in schools (thanks to companies like Elmer’s), we have spawned Generation Glue Stick, a explosion of young people who have grown to understand the world through a prism of order, convenience, and tidiness. Let me explain. For a long time, students in younger grades had to make do with what they had. Want to glue two papers together for an art project? A student used a bottle of glue for that. This was, by its nature, an imperfect device. One had to be rather careful when using the glue bottle, making sure not to overdo it. Personally, I liked to employ the ‘glue dotting technique,’ where a person places a small dot of glue on each corner of the paper and sticks it to something that way. It required patience. The glue took awhile to dry. Also, classrooms weren’t always that well stocked with glue bottles. Sometimes there was only one big bottle and you waited your turn to use it. That said, I never considered a bottle of glue to be particularly hard to use until recently. My kids, it seems, are very glue stick reliant. Give them a bottle of glue, and it’s a disaster. There’s glue everywhere and lots of children crying. While convenience is the major draw of the glue stick, independence is a benefit as well. Schools have tons of little glue sticks so that each student can glue his or her own stuff in solitude. There is very little waiting or sharing. It’s a fact that having only four glue sticks will turn an otherwise normal class of ten kids into Lord of the Flies.

This is an awarding winning piece of art created by an elementary school student. I didn’t have much time for abstract art in elementary school, as I was too busy drawing dragons.

Body Paragraph #3: The glue stick isn’t the only culprit. Everything, for today’s young student, is constructed on a platform of order and visual aesthetic. At the risk of sounding really old, when I was a kid, White Out was a delicacy, something used only in special cases where the scribble out technique just wasn’t acceptable. Today, all my kids carry around white out tape. Before, kids wrote with little nub pencils that had shrunk down to a half an inch from lots of usage. Today’s kids have immortal mechanical pencils that they fill with pristinely thin pieces of lead in a delicate procedure, done with the care of a surgeon making an incision. Very little is handwritten today. Final drafts are almost always typed. Crayons are Stone Age-level old fashioned. With copy machines in all schools, kids can always screw up their worksheet and ask the teacher for a clean new one. Class speeches have a PowerPoint presentation to back them. Instruction has become more visual and structured as well. Take a writing assignment, for instance. I can remember jotting down a crappy outline on a sheet of loose leaf paper. Now, reading and writing assignments involve a giant variety of mental maps, graphic organizers, brain storming diagrams, and the like. There is a real sense of perfection in the work of today’s students. It’s no wonder that Laura will only use the blue scissors or accept hearts for her correct answers. For her, everything in education has been done by design, been crafted and molded to fit. It’s not a negative thing. Call it a new outlook. With the glue stick and its cohorts, our children today are being encouraged not only to be creative, but to be professional about it.

Conclusion: Generation Glue Stick, in many ways, is more advanced than previous generations were. They will grow to become people who file things well, who document, who know how to plate food in a visually pleasing way, and who will hand in reports that are spaced properly and don’t have mustard spilled on them. True, they can’t use a glue bottle, they don’t work particularly well with others, and they have difficulty dealing with mistakes and adversity. It doesn’t matter. They know how to fix things. Whatever mistakes they’ve made will safely be confined to the outline, and, I’m pretty sure, no parents hang outlines up on the refrigerator door.

*

It’s All Positive, the Way I See It

Academy Summer Progress Report

Student: Bob O.

Subject: English

Teacher: Bill

Comments: Bob is a very enthusiastic young man, filled with life and energy.  He has shown consistent progress this year.  You should be very proud as parents.  Bob is well liked by his peers and has a wonderful sense of humor.  He is upbeat and always smiling.

Academically, this semester has been one of growth for Bob O.  A review of testing data proves this.  On our semester’s first assessment, Bob received a score of 2/30.  However, on the second assessment, he doubled his score with 4/30!  On the third and final assessment, Bob continued to show improvement with a score of 5/30.  This empirical data indicates that Bob is making tremendous progress and will continue to improve with further studies.

Behaviorally, Bob is still adjusting to the classroom.  He typically talks through the entire lesson, but this is okay because it points to him being socially popular and accepted by his peers.  Bob has a difficult time listening and paying attention, which is probably because of his age (17).  Clearly his attention span will get better as he matures.  Finally, I feel a note should be made regarding the blinding incident: I apologize for initially over-reacting and would like to say that it was obviously just an accident.  In retrospect, it has become clear to me that Bob was simply waving his pencil in joy and did not intend in any way to stab his classmate in the eyeball.  Instead of being stern with him, I should have acknowledged his wonderful enthusiasm for learning.

In terms of skills, Bob has many.  He struggles with reading, but knows that words exist and that they are sometimes combined into sentences.  Writing is also an area where Bob can further develop his skills with more practice.  Currently, he cannot write words and is inconsistent in making letters.  He does, though, own a pencil (as we know from the incident mentioned earlier).  Often times, the importance of having the proper tools is overlooked when one gauges writing development.  It has been said by some – yes, including myself – that Bob’s effort appears to be lacking; going forward, I propose that instead of forcing him into curriculum based lessons that he seems to have little interest in, we can better teach him through the use of video games and television programs.  As a teacher, I need to incorporate an individualized approach to Bob’s education.  I apologize, and will be sure to spend the bulk of my evenings making educational games for him.

Overall, Bob is a tremendous student and has been a joy to have in class.  To be honest, I am considering leaving the school soon due to unbearable ulcer pain.  That said, I am sure the next teacher will love Bob O. just as much as I have!  : )

Parent Signature (Forgery Accepted):_____________________________

*

Big Mother Is Watching You

Back in the USA, my classroom was very much like an impenetrable fortress.  I think “fortress” is the right word here.  Remember when Pat Buchanan nicknamed his foreign policy “Fortress America”?  He meant that the country would close its borders and return to a doctrine of isolationism.  That’s exactly what my classroom was like.  Fortress Classroom.  The door was always shut, only rarely did anyone come in to observe what was happening, and my students, for the most part, didn’t even talk to their parents about what went on in class.  In other words, the only people who had a very strong idea concerning what was going on in my classroom were me and the students.  What happened in Mr. Panara’s classroom, stayed in Mr. Panara’s classroom.

Don’t get too excited.  ”What happened” in Mr. Panara’s classroom was typically English lessons, so scratch me off your list of possible bachelor party locations.

Most of the other classrooms were like this too.  I used to tell new teachers one bit of advice: never (well, in extreme circumstances yes, but otherwise never) write administrative referrals on students.  The administration encouraged teachers to fill out a form which would refer students to them for disciplinary reasons, but in truth, teachers who wrote a lot of administrative referrals were viewed as being unable to handle their classes.  It was a sign of weakness.  Conversely, a teacher could have a complete madhouse going on behind that closed door, and as long as that teacher didn’t start writing referrals, the school’s administration would go on thinking everything was fine and dandy.  Sadly, I suppose, that was the preferable option.  Teachers who went to the admins seeking help with their classes often wound up being the ones on action plans and under tight scrutiny.  Teachers who shut up got to keep teaching their hell classes without anyone breathing down their necks.

As I mentioned before, at the school where I taught, parent involvement was pretty minimal.  Most of the time, when I called parents, they were in the dark about what was happening with their kid’s education.  Trying to set up a parent/teacher conference was as difficult as trying to get Lennon and McCarthy to sit down and discuss reuniting The Beatles.  And I don’t mean in 1975.  I mean now.

By my last year teaching at my high school in Charlotte, NC, technology was altering the “Fortress Classroom” reality, albeit only slightly.  Cell phones, and their ability to record things, absolutely made teachers more aware of what they and their students were saying and doing.  Nobody wanted to end up on YouTube with the title “Teacher Meltdown” or “Dance War in Science Class.”  Also, teachers were required to keep an electronic grade book, so parents could log into a website anytime and check out their kid’s grade.  The Internet changed things too.   Websites like “Rate My Teacher,” where students can go and give teachers a number rating and leave comments, starting popping up.  Just as with other aspects of life, technology and the Internet was taking what used to be a closed door and cracking it open a little.

None of that, however, compares even slightly to what teaching at a hakwon in South Korea is like.  In America, people on the outside are peeking into the classroom only slightly.  Here, they’ve got both eyes firmly planted on you as though you’re on The Real World: Classroom Edition.  To illustrate, I will provide a helpful bulleted list:

• In America, the classroom is typically a closed box.  The windows only teasingly expose the sun and the beautiful land the children are not allowed to enjoy until the final bell rings.  At my school in Korea, there is no view of the outside world and the fourth wall to my classroom – the one facing the hallway – is one giant sheet of glass.  Anybody can see in at any time.  In addition to this, anybody walking down the hallway inevitably captures the students’ attention and throws them off task.  This happens about once every 10-15 seconds.
• In my classroom in Korea (where mothers typically don’t work), there is a CCTV camera.  If you’re unfamiliar with CCTV, it basically means that there’s a surveillance camera in the classroom.  The front office has a big flat screen television where there is a live feed from all the classrooms.  Often times, I’ll pass by the front office and see a few mothers sitting in there, watching.
• The kids in Korea tend to tell their parents everything that happens.  Pretty regularly, I have some mother call the school to complain.  The biggest complaints are that I give the kids too much free time (like 5 mins at the end every other class) or that some kid swore in Korean during class.  This makes me look bad.  Not because the kids are not working on English, but because one would think I would’ve learned the Korean curse words by now.
• Every five months or so, teachers are required to do “open classes,” where the mothers come in and literally join the class.  They typically sit there tight-lipped and stone faced, as though they’re watching the Kony video or that Adam Sandler movie where he played his own sister.

I wonder if this is an improvement over what I formerly had.  I remember the countless meetings where we tried to come up with ways to increase parental involvement. Now, I’ve got parental involvement.  In fact, I have so much parental involvement, the mothers have unlimited access to the classroom.  And you know what?  I don’t think it’s helping much of anything.  It’s got me thinking, though, and questioning how open a classroom should be.

Maybe not a fortress, and maybe not a glass house.  I do believe there needs to be some sense of privacy for a classroom to come to life, and I also think poor teachers are able to hide in the dark for too long.  I’m sure that we’ll see how accessible the classroom becomes.  The possibilities, I suppose, are endless, if you have time and a computer.

Want to know what your child did in school today?  Click ‘Download.’

*

 

Adventures In Teaching: The Ruiner Of Fun

Andy isn’t a bad student.  He’s friendly and funny, a happy-go-lucky ten year old who laughs a lot and answers questions in class with the desperation of a man proclaiming his innocence at his murder trial.  The rest of the kids in the class like Andy.  If he was a gladiator and his opponent had the chance to kill him, the other kids would likely give the ‘thumbs up,’ sparing him.  I, on the other hand, would most certainly get the “thumbs down.”  And, knowing how I’m typically the only one who cares about how clean the classroom is, I’m sure in this analogy I would somehow have to use my last moments to tidy the arena, making sure it would not be blighted by my soon-to-be carcass.

As nice as he is, there’s a dark side to Andy.  This surfaced when we were doing a unit in the book about being polite.  I had to teach terms like “don’t cut in line” and “don’t push.”  This really excited me, as Koreans cut to the front all the time and shove people around like they’re offensive linemen.  Maybe this lesson could initiate a change in culture.  Anyways, to demonstrate, I had the kids stand in a line and then pretended to be a terrible rude person, cutting and behaving obnoxiously (which I’m rather excellent at).  It was all in good fun.  I playfully pushed a few students.  “Don’t push!” they said, using the new vocabulary.  ”What a smashing success!” I thought.  It was a nice bit of educational enjoyment until I playfully pushed Andy who, laughing and smiling, swiftly delivered a karate kick straight into my knee cap that made me moan out loud in pain.

“Aaaarghhhh!” I went, hobbling away.  A few classes later, we were playing a vocabulary game with a little bean bag.  The students would catch the bean bag, say their English words and gently toss it to a classmate.  Everything was going fine and dandy until Andy caught the bean bag and proceeded to gun it into the face of the kid sitting next to him.  The poor boy held his mouth in agony, signaling the end of the bean bag game.  All the while, Andy roared with laughter, as though he was in the audience of Def Comedy Jam or something.

Andy is The Ruiner of Fun.  He doesn’t understand the boundaries of play.  Try to give Andy a high five, he’ll stab your hand with a pencil.  Have the kids get out of their seats for an activity, Andy will inevitably end up hitting someone.  Don’t dare let Andy use scissors without having a first aid kit readily available.  Like I said at the beginning, he’s not a mean kid…he’s just…I don’t know…goofy.  Whatever there is that tells most kids that “this is funny, but that’s not funny” doesn’t exist in Andy’s brain.  To him, it’s all fun and games even when someone loses an eye.

The Ruiner of Fun comes in other shapes and forms too.  There’s the Dour Student, who won’t participate in class activities.  Then there’s the Super Competitor, who wants to win the spelling game so badly, he will explode and turn on his teammates, blaming his defeat on their stupidity and then lashing out at the other teams.  There’s also the Can’t Get Through the Rules Boy, who turns the part at the beginning of the class activity where the teacher explains what is going on into a three-hour epic affair, talking non-stop and then shouting about how he “doesn’t get it.”  All of these incarnations are equally lethal to a less formal classroom environment, and each of them inspires a teacher to turn to good old-fashioned methods like worksheets or notes on the overhead.

As an educator, it’s difficult to know exactly what to do with The Ruiner of Fun.  You want student engagement and, more importantly, student enjoyment.  You don’t want to be the crusty old professor type who lectures and puts more kids to sleep than Children’s Nyquil.  So what happens when a class has one or two Ruiners of Fun?  What do you do?  Exclude them?  Give them the little talk yet again about what kind of behavior is expected and pray for the best?

Trying to make learning fun carries with it great risk.  The next time you see a teacher on crutches or a child with the imprint of a small bean bag on his face, know that they aren’t victims of a lunchroom riot or a fight on the playground.  They are, instead, victims of learning.

*

Adventures in Teaching: The Popcorn and Glue Incident

There are moments in the classroom when, as an educator, I say to myself, “How the hell did this happen?”  Such an incident occurred last week.  A little boy had tearfully stormed out of the school, there was popcorn all over my classroom, and my butt was covered in glue.  It was, one might say, not a highpoint in my professional life.  For the first time that day, my two inner voices were saying the same thing.  “That was bad,” they both agreed, speaking harmoniously.

You see, every educator has two different voices in his or her head.  One is the Teacher Voice, which addresses situations and analyzes problems from a perspective based on past experience, grad classes, and years of classroom management trainings.  The other one, which is sometimes contrasting but not always, is the Human Voice.  This is the more rational side of an educator, the side that sees things as a person and not strictly as a trained professional.  Allowing both voices to engage in an inner conversation is imperative; it lets a teacher maintain high personal standards while, at the same time, acknowledging and accepting that our students don’t always rise to those said standards.  The two voices help us distinguish between role and reality.  Yeah, I’m a teacher, but I’m also a regular guy.  By the same token, my students are there to learn and to fulfill whatever duties the role of ‘student’ dictates that one satisfies and, at the same time, they’re kids trying their best to make it through the day.

My Teacher Voice is generally pretty hard-ass.  When things start going wrong in the classroom, it’s my Teacher Voice that assesses the situation and comes up with a solution.  Of course the Human Voice helps too.  It tells the Teacher Voice not to take itself so seriously.  “They’re misbehaving,” the Teacher Voice might say, to which the Human Voice replies, “Yeah, what do you expect…they’re eight years old.”

Lately, I’ve noticed that my Human Voice has been making most of the calls in the classroom, much to the chagrin of my Teacher Voice.  Case in point – “Dream Class.”  All of the classes I teach at my school have funky English names (there’s Champ and Smart and Elf and Fly, etc), and Dream was, at one point, the easiest and best of them all.  This particular class only has four kids in it – three little girls and a little boy.  One would think four kids would be pretty easy to control, and for awhile they were.  But then the tide started to change, mostly because I let it.  Teaching them English was fun, but really, inside, all I really wanted to do was play with them and joke around.  I mean, hear me out, they’re really cute little kids.   There’s a thin line between running a classroom and having a big old party, and I was crossing that line dangerously.  One of the little girls in the class is named Angelina and during the Family Unit in the textbook, Angelina started running to the front of the classroom, taking my wooden pointer stick and whacking me with it.

“You’re a baby!” she’d yell.  “You’re a baby teacher!”

The three other kids would laugh and she’d whack me again.  “You’re a grandmother!  You’re a baby grandmother!”

Then the two voices would both give their take on what was happening.

Teacher Voice: This is not good.  Send her back to her seat.  It’s not acceptable that the student is beating the teacher with a wooden stick.

Human Voice: This is adorable!  And it’s hilarious!  Don’t be so strict – she’s having fun and nothing bad is happening.  Look, all the kids think it’s funny.  She’s even speaking English!  This is a riot!

In time, though, Dream class started getting truly riotous, as in, teaching them was like being in the middle of a riot.  Things were further complicated when the mother of the little boy – Joe – called the school and complained about me.  “Joe thinks you don’t like him,” Leah, my boss, told me.  “He wants to quit the academy.  He says you only like the girls and you don’t call on him.  I think at home he is a little spoiled.”

At times like this, the input of the voices switch.  The Teacher Voice becomes the rational one, while the Human Voice gets all silly and sensitive.

Teacher Voice: That’s understandable.  He feels neglected.  Give the little boy some more attention.

Human Voice: What the hell?  I call on him all the time.  I’m so nice to him.  I’ve never, ever been anything but ridiculously nice to him.  And his mother has the nerve to call my boss and complain about me?  So people, man, some people…

It was on Thursday that things spiraled all out of control.  At the very start of class, Angelina came running in with an open bag of popcorn.  Kernels of popcorn went spilling out of the bag everywhere, going all over the floor.  Before I could say much of anything, Joe and Amy (one of the other kids), started stomping on the popcorn and throwing it at each other.

“Stop!” I said, loudly.  “Sit down!”

Teacher Voice: They made a mess.  It’s a natural consequence that they now have to clean it.  Have them clean the floor.

So I tried.  “Joe,” I said, holding out the garbage can, “pick up the popcorn.”

“No,” Joe said, plainly and simply.

“Amy, you threw popcorn too.  Please pick up what you threw and put it in the trashcan.”

“Oh no!” she said, shaking her head and turning her back to me.  In the end, I took a book and used it to sweep up and clean the popcorn myself.

Human Voice: That was good.  You don’t want to get in a power struggle with little kids.  You handled that well.

A half hour later, I noticed the Joe was writing on Amy’s back in red pen.  I told him not to do that.  I imagined Amy’s mother calling and complaining that her daughter’s coat had pen all over it.  Joe didn’t even feign listening, and a few minutes later went write back to laughing and scribbling on his classmate.

Teacher Voice: This is the second time he didn’t follow an instruction.  You have to assert some sort of authority so that he knows that you’re the teacher.

“Joe,” I said, “give me the pen.”

He gave it up happily.  It didn’t matter.  In the blink of an eye, he was scribbling all over Amy again, this time using his highlighter.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.  “Give me the highlighter.”

“No,” Joe said, pulling it tight to his body.

Teacher Voice: Be firm.

Human Voice: Kill him.

Well, not kill him per say, that’s a bit over the top, but at this point I was running out of patience.  I asked for the highlighter again, and again, and again, and that was when I felt something on my butt.  I turned around to find Angelina rubbing a glue stick all over my jeans.

“What are you thinking?!” I said, my voice raised.  “Sit down!”

I touched the back of my jeans and felt how sticky it was, all covered in glue stick.

Teacher Voice: They’re completely out of control.  No more fun and games.  Take the class back to square one and treat them like this is the first day of school.

Human Voice: I’ve got glue all over my ass!  These kids have gone crazy!

My next move was another utter failure.  In our school, the kids get stickers for good behavior, which they keep in a sticker book.  I took Joe’s sticker book.  “Give me the highlighter, and I will give you back your sticker book.”  Instead of doing that, Joe burst into hysterical tears.

Both Voices: Fuck my life.  I see another complaint in my future.

After class I gave Joe his sticker book back and hugged him.  “Come on, buddy!  You’re my chingu! (“friend” in Korean)  But you have to listen to me when I ask you to do something.”

Soon after, Leah was in my classroom, wanting to know what happened.  Instead of going to his next class, Joe had stormed out of the academy.

We all have days like this, I guess.  Days when things just seem to go all wrong.  As a teacher, I ask myself what I could have done to handle things better.  Was I too strict?  Was I not strict enough?  Did a lack of consistency confuse the kids?  Would I be able to sit down at my desk, or will that result in me being stuck to my chair?

Joe’s mom did in fact call and complain again.  I got a lecture from my school about not raising my voice to the students.  Fine.  The next day Joe came in laughing and acting just as goofy as ever.  It was tough not to smile.  He’s a silly little kid.  He only wants to laugh and write on people with a highlighter.  Is that so wrong of him?  No.  Of course not.

My Teacher Voice even cracked a little bit of a smile.  “Be firm,” it said, “but move on.”  And that’s just what I did.

*

Horse Shoes and Heavy Artillery

On a dreary morning back in 2006, I was stopped by the police on my way to work.  At that time, I taught at an elementary school in a rough area of Charlotte, North Carolina.  To get to the school, I had to follow a series of twisting roads that weaved their way through the projects.  Each time I drove through, it was depressing.  It was eye opening to see the conditions my kids lived in.  That particular morning when the police stopped me, I was ordered to turn my car around and go to the school a different way.  The police didn’t say why.

It wasn’t until I got to school that I was told, “Everyone got turned around.  It’s a crime scene.  There’s a dead body in the street.”

Then, a few hours later, I was called into the guidance counselor’s office.  “Mr. P,” she said, “the person who was shot late last night…well, it’s Jamaal’s cousin.”  Jamaal was one of my students.  He was in the third grade, energetic and always smiling.  He had little corn rows and was insanely cute.  The guidance counselor continued, “He’s not the only child in our school who has had a family member die recently.  I’m going to start a group at the school for grief counseling.  I will let you know when I’ll be taking Jamaal out of class.”

*

For the students in South Korea, nothing is funnier than to joke about death.  The death joke is a real crowd pleaser.  During the daily attendance, I might ask something like, “Is Harold here today?”  Some kid will inevitably shout out, “No teacher – he is die!”  Then the whole class will burst into laughter.  Yesterday, I did a lesson with “Champ” class about using the words ‘always’ and ‘never.’  I asked the class, “What is something you never do?”

“I never die!”

“I never kill my mother!”

“I never kill my friends!”

“Your answers concern me,” I said, “although I’d be more concerned if you said those things for ‘always.’”  Other things concern me too.  Once, I asked a student named John, “What do you want to be when you get older?”  He shot back, “Teacher, I want to be terrorist!”  While the class went bananas with laughter, I thought about how that joke would NEVER fly in the US.  On another occasion, I was teaching a class of around 35 kids at the public high school in Incheon, when a student named ‘Rust’ burst into the classroom holding a toy gun.

“Bam!  Bang!” Rust shouted, aiming the gun at his classmates and pretending to fire.  I stood there dumbfounded.  It didn’t even concern me that he had interrupted the lesson.  The whole class laughed and smiled at Rust’s joke.  The toy gun looked real.

I wonder if, in America, the students would’ve jumped under their desks.

*

In the warm Charlotte spring, my small class of elementary students got 45 minutes a day to play on the playground.  I
was walking to the playground with Jamaal one day when we passed an area that had been set up for the game Horseshoes.  There were stakes put in the ground, maybe thirty feet apart.  I looked at the stakes in the ground and immediately thought, “Horseshoes.”  Jamaal thought something different.

“Mr. P,” he said, pointing to them, “who’s buried there?”

I tried to explain that nobody was buried there.  It was a game.  Horseshoes.  He didn’t know the game.  After school I went into the school gym and asked the gym teacher if she had a set of horseshoes so we could play.

“Horseshoes?” she said, surprised.  “No, I don’t have that.  Why do you want to play horseshoes?”

“I dunno,” I said.  “The kids in the class don’t know it.”

“Here, I have a couple Frisbees,” she said.  “You could throw them.”

Good enough.  The next day my class played “Frisbee Horseshoes.”  It wasn’t especially interesting or fun.  I’m not sure the kids really learned the game; as for me, I learned that hitting a stake in the ground with a Frisbee is a lot harder than hitting it with a u-shaped piece of metal.

Much more importantly, I wonder if Jamaal understood.

It’s a game.  Not a graveyard.  It’s okay to be a kid.

*

Almost one year ago today, North Korea fired 170 artillery rounds at Yeonpyeong Island in response to a South Korean military drill.  On November 23, 2010, North Korea fired on the island’s military base, killing four and injuring 18.  I remember how freaked out a lot of the foreigners teaching in Korea were, and how calm and collected the Koreans acted.  At my high school in Incheon, it was business as usual.  No one seemed to bat an eyelash over the attack, which the United Nations said was the “most serious crisis on the Korean peninsula since the 1953 armistice which ended the Korean War.”

About a week after it happened, one of my students rushed into class.  “Teacher!” he shouted.  “North Korea has attacked again!  It is war!”

I had just gotten off the Internet and saw nothing about a new attack.  All I could think to say to the student was, “Really?”

He laughed.  “No teacher.  It is joke.”

I couldn’t help but smile.  “Well played, my friend.”

Last year’s attack is a reminder that the possibility of war, while remote, is present.  Maybe because I can’t speak Korean, I can’t really tell if my students worry about that or if they’ve accepted it as a part of their reality.  I remember some students proudly saying, “We will fight North Korea, and we will win!”  While others said, “There will be no war.  They are our brothers.  We are all Korean.”

Still, although the threat of violence is so close, I don’t think the kids in Korea know death like my students in America did.  I later transferred to a high school in Charlotte; I remember the students talking about their friends and family members who had been shot and killed.  Death isn’t something that the students make jokes about.  It doesn’t mean that the students in Korea are less mature.  Actually, their innocence is maybe the way it should be.  It must be nice be nice to grow up in a place where guns, terrorism, and death are just ideas, safe and abstract.

And where the teacher doesn’t have to take an alternate route, because his third grade student’s cousin is covered with a blanket out in the middle of the street.

*

Billy Is Gay!

This is the story of how I butted heads with a student, ended up stealing her cell phone, and was eventually reprimanded by my school for giving her an obscene gesture (although I was innocent).  In the course of reading this, I hope you will see how a teacher can never really guess what’s going to happen next.  Teaching is full of surprises, little moments that a reflective person unlike myself can learn from.  I don’t know if I learned anything from the events that transpired with “Miss A,” other than the statement of fact that provides our story with its title:

Billy is gay.

It all began on a Thursday, my first Thursday at the new school.  Up until that point, things had gone wonderfully.  The kids seemed awesome and classes were off to a good start.  That all changed when a heavy-set middle school girl came bounding through the door.  This was my last Thursday class, a group of ten middle school kids.  My attention was quickly gobbled up by the girl I mentioned earlier; she was incredibly loud and seemed to be the leader of the gang of middle school girls that sat around her.  It’s not hard to tell when the “bad” student walks into the room.  They typically like to announce their presence.

“Hello everyone,” I said to the class.  I wrote my name on the board.  “My name is Bill.  It’s easy to remember.  Just like Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton, or Bill Belamy.”

I figured the students would know one of them, most likely Belamy, and that would help them pronounce my name.  Before I could say another word, the girl I’d already started to worry about exploded.

“Billy!” she shouted.  “Hahaha!!!  Billy is gay!  Teacher is gay!”

This caused the rest of the class to go berserk.  Suddenly everyone was saying, “Billy!  Billy!”

“Um,” I said.  “Okay.  It’s actually Bill.  So it would be good if we could stick to that, I guess.  Bill.”

“Teacher!” the girl laughed.  “Billy means gay!”

“Well, that’s nice to know,” I said, and then tried to change the subject.  “What is your name?”

“Billy!  My name is Billy!”

The class was seriously losing it.  I felt embarrassed and it was only two minutes into the first class.  I faked a laugh.  “Nice one.  Really, what is your name?”

“No name,” she said, a huge smile on her face.  “Haha.  Gay.  Billy.

That fifty minute class seemed to go on forever.  When it finally came to a close, Leah, my boss, came in my room.  “How was the big girl?” she asked me.  “She gave the last foreign teacher many problems.”

“She was bad,” I said, admittedly.  “We’ll figure her out.”

I’ve been teaching for awhile now, and so I was confident that I could ease this student back onto the road more travelled

The ladies of Miss A

(the road where students don’t answer ‘how are you?’ with ‘teacher is gay’).  The next time the class met, I gave her lots of attention and was super nice.  She still wouldn’t make up a name for herself, so I dubbed her “Miss A” after the popular Korean music group.  I joked around with her and gave her candy at the end of class.  The following week was more of the same.  This was theory one – win her over.  I rigged the English game we played so that she won and then gave her money (only 1,000 KW, but still) as a prize.

I was convinced that soon she would not see me as an adversary; she would see me as the greatest person ever to step foot in her hogwon.

For that first month, Miss A was still bad, but she was manageable.  She was loud and obsessed with the whole Billy thing, but she did her work and participated in the class.  Things would regress in the second month.  I blame a two week span where I didn’t see her class at all – my English class was cancelled due to testing.  When Miss A came back, it was like the first day times infinity.

“Teacher likes boys!  Teacher is gay!  Gay gay gay!  Billy!”

And then it caught on.  In one of my elementary school classes, a tiny little boy named Daniel pointed at me and said, “Bill Teacher is gay.”  Walking through the hallways, I started to get it from the majority of the middle school kids I’d walk by.  “Hi Billy!” they’d say, cracking up.

The second theory went into effect – ignore it and be above it.  Now, I wish I could say that being called ‘gay’ was no different from them saying ‘stupid’ or ‘ugly.’  That it was just another name.  Really, the whole thing was starting to get under my skin, and I wish I could say that it was because it disrupted class and, hey, I’m human and I just don’t like being laughed at constantly.  That wouldn’t be the truth, though.  I think if it was “teacher is stupid,” I wouldn’t have cared too much.  It probably is a bit homophobic; being called gay all the time bothered me.  Especially because it led to having a bunch of kids, including a lot of young boys, going around the school saying “teacher likes boys.”  That was NOT cool at all.  It was slander, man.  Baseless slander.  Or slander based on, I guess, my name.

“Damn,” I said to myself.  “I should’ve told them my name is William.”

Ignoring it wasn’t making it go away.  It was only getting worse.  Miss A had infected the whole school.

Finally, on a Wednesday, I went straight into theory three – get strict.  I was sitting at my desk when Miss A ran into the classroom, a bunch of girls following behind her.  I was surprised to see her, as she’s not in my Wednesday class.  “Teacher,” she said, smiling, “do you like boys?”

The girls behind her burst into hysterics.  I stood up.  I told the others to leave.  “Listen,” I said in my serious voice, the door closed behind us, “it isn’t funny anymore.  NOT FUNNY.  No more gay joke.  Do you understand?  I want you to STOP IT.  No more.”

She nodded and smiled and laughed like I was telling her the parrot joke.  The next day in class, it was obvious that our little talk was pointless.  “Billy!” she shouted to the delight of her peers.  “Teacher is Billy!”

I wanted to kick her in the face.  As a professional, my judgment told me to refrain from that.  “Deep breaths,” I said to myself.  “Stay cool.”  I told her to stop again.  She didn’t.  Then I noticed that her cell phone was sitting on her desk.  I snatched it up and put it in my pocket.

“Done,” I said.  “The joke is done.  No more.  If you want your phone back, quiet rest of class.  No more talking.  Quiet.”

This was theory four – desperation.

Like its predecessors, it failed miserably.  Miss A kept talking, just now in Korean.  The class kept laughing.  “Okay,” I said.  I took a piece of paper and wrote the following:

“Dear Parents, Your daughter’s phone was taken due to poor behavior.  To get it back, call me.  I would like to talk to you.  My number is ________________.  Thanks.”    

I gave the paper to Miss A.  “You’re not getting your phone back until mom or dad calls,” I said.  This quieted her.  For the rest of class, she wrote a long apology letter.  After the bell rang, she approached me with it.

“Teacher, I am very sorry,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said.  “You’ll get your phone back when mom or dad calls me.”

She held the note out.  I took it and threw it in the garbage.

“Teacher!” she called to me, frantically.  “I am sorry!  Please give me phone!”

I shut the door.  My serious tone was gone.  I was pissed.  “I tried to be nice to you.  I tried to talk to you.  I told you yesterday to stop it, and you didn’t.  It’s been two months of this!  I took the phone and told you to be quiet, and you kept on talking.  It’s NOT FUNNY.  You’re not getting this phone back until I hear from your parents.  You’re not sorry – you just want your phone back.”

I stormed out of the building before any of the Korean teachers would know what was happening.  Miss A followed me to my apartment.  I left her outside while I put the phone in my nightstand.  I had plans in Incheon that night, and I headed for the subway.  Miss A and her posse followed me almost the entire way.

“Teacher,” they pleaded, “we did not understand.  It is because you are American and we are Korean.  It is culture mistake.”

I did my best not to argue, but once in awhile I couldn’t stay quiet.  “That’s ridiculous.  It has nothing to do with culture.”  They kept following me.  Eventually they gave up.  I walked away as fast as I could, and, with my back turned to them, threw up the peace sign.

Riding the subway I felt nervous.  Had I done the right thing?  Probably not, but did I do something outrageously wrong?  I wondered if I should’ve talked to the Korean teachers.  I didn’t because I’d been told stories that, since a hogwon (private English academy) is more like a business than a school, the students get away with murder – the institutes don’t want to jeopardize a student dropping out and losing the enrollment money.  I told myself to forget about it.  To try and enjoy my night and forget about Miss A for the time being.

At seven o’clock the next morning, I was reminded of the whole thing in the worst way possible.  Miss A’s alarm was going off and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.  Being woken up early, I suppose, is one of the dangers in taking a kid’s cell phone.

On Friday, a Korean teacher I’d never met before came down to talk to me.  “You have my student’s cell phone,” she said.  “She would like to see you and apologize.  She’s very sorry.

“Um,” I said, feeling awkward, “here’s the thing.  I get that she’s sorry.  That’s cool.  This is about making sure it doesn’t happen again, and that’s why I need to speak to her parents.”

“Her parents are very strict, though, and they will be angry.”

“Right.  I guess that’s kind of the point.”

The teacher obviously wanted me to give the phone back.  “She cannot study.  Her mind is thinking about the phone.  She has cried many times.”

“I understand,” I said, not yielding.  “So have the parents call me, and I’ll give the phone back, and everything will be awesome.”

“Her parents don’t speak English.  What can you say?  How will you talk to them?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  It was a good point.  “I just want them to call, I guess.  To show that they’re aware and so I’ll have their number to contact if something else happens later.”

The bell ran and I went to class.  Between every class, the same teacher came down, trying to talk me into giving the phone back.  “What am I supposed to do?” she asked several times.  “How can I help this situation?”

By her fourth visit, I was losing patience.  “Have the parents call me,” I said, in an irritated tone.  “That’s what you can do.”

It got more uncomfortable.  Leah came in to talk to me.  “It is a culture misunderstanding,” she said.  “In Korea, it is okay to be gay.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said.  Then I lied a little.  “But it’s not about the word ‘gay.’  I just want her to stop disrupting class.”
“Her parents are angry with the school,” she said.  “They have called and yelled.  You gave her ‘fuck you’ hand gesture.”

This was a curveball I didn’t expect.  “What?!” I nearly shouted.

“You did this,” she said, and then she did the British two-finger ‘fuck you’ thing.  I thought back to what happened.  When I walked away to get on the subway, I had thrown up the peace sign.  Since my back was to her, it was backwards and probably looked a lot like the two fingered salute.

“I didn’t do that!” I said defensively.  “I’m American!  I don’t do that two fingered thing.  I threw up deuces!  It was deuces, man, not the fuck you thing!  If I wanted to say ‘fuck you,’ I’d put up one finger!”

Everything was wrong.  It was a mess.  To summarize what happened next, I gave Miss A her phone back on Monday.  Then she either dropped out of English class or stopped going to the hogwon altogether.  I’m not sure and I didn’t ask.  I haven’t seen her in three weeks, not since I handed her the phone back.  I was happy to, in a way.  Getting woken up at 7:00 in the morning sucks.

I don’t know what to think of the whole fiasco.  Her former class is very good now, well behaved and positive.  I feel like they get something from the lessons.  Nobody calls me ‘gay’ or says I like boys.  The students on a whole appear to enjoy my English class.  If one believes in a greater good, then I clearly did the right thing by, ultimately, getting her to drop out.  Yet, I can’t help feeling like I failed.  She was my student and now she’s gone.  I didn’t get through to her.  In her mind, I stole her phone and flicked her off.  I was abominable.  Yes, abominable.  An abominable gay man.

Sometimes I sit at my desk and think about what I could’ve done differently.  The other day a thought came to me that I’d never thought of it before.  “Maybe,” I said to myself, “when she asked me if I liked boys, I should’ve just said ‘no.’”

*

Dark Hair? Yeah, We Got That

Backpack 4, one of the many books my school uses, begins with a unit on personal description.  Since I have 32 classes a week and little prep time, occasionally – gasp! – I don’t really look at the material I’m teaching ahead of time, and this was the case yesterday when an activity out of the textbook didn’t quite go as the curriculum makers probably imagined it would.

In the first activity from the book, there’s a big picture of four kids.  Backpack is all about cultural diversity, and so the children are named Juan, Jennifer, Young-mi, and Helmut.  However, the names are not in order, and the students have to match the name with the picture of the kid.  This would take some kids about two seconds, as obviously Young-mi is the Asian girl, Jennifer is the white one, Juan the Hispanic boy, and Helmut the crazy looking blonde kid.  Luckily, my class of South Korean children weren’t able to pick up on that, and so I got to play the CD.  They sat attentively, matching the names as the woman on the CD spoke:

“Helmut has blonde hair.  Jennifer has curly hair.  Young-mi has glasses.  Juan has dark hair.”

Based on the descriptions, the kids were able to tell who was who.  The next activity was when things went downhill.  The students were supposed to do a scavenger hunt of who in the class matched what description.  “Oh, I get it,” I said, looking at the activity for the first time, “this will be fun!  Let’s do it together!”

Number one read “Who has red hair?”  We all looked around the room.  “Okay,” I said.  “None of us have red hair.  So in that case, we write ‘No one has red hair.’”

Q2: Who has blonde hair?

A: No one has blonde hair.

Q3: Who has dark hair?

With this question, the trend that would follow for the rest of the activity was set.  I scratched the stubble on my face.  “This is sort of the opposite,” I said.  “Um, we can write ‘Everyone has dark hair.’”

It was dawning on me that this might not be the most effective lesson for a class of all Asian children.

Q4. Who has blue eyes?

A: No one has blue eyes.

Q5. Who has green eyes?

A: No one has green eyes.

Q6. Who has brown eyes?

A: Everyone has brown eyes.

I quickly read over the rest of the list.  Almost all of the traits were either common to everyone or completely absent.

Q7.  Who has curly hair?

A: No one has curly hair.

Q8.  Who has straight hair?

A: Everyone has straight hair.

And it went on like that.  We learned that nobody in the class has eyes that aren’t brown and hair that isn’t dark and straight.  By the end of the lesson, ‘Roy has glasses’ was the only sentence that didn’t start with ‘everyone’ or ‘no one.’  It kind of felt like the students were being generalized even though that obviously wasn’t the intention.  Everyone just turned out to have the same physical characteristics.  After the class was over, they all went to go eat noodles and practice tae kwon do (I kid the Asians).

I laughed while we did the class scavenger hunt.  Everyone was similar and that was kind of funny.  It made me a little thankful, though, that I got to go to school in a place where SOMEBODY had red hair or blue eyes.  Differences aren’t necessary, I guess, but they’re nice.

I’m sure Helmut, Juan, Jennifer and Young-mi would agree.

*

Martin

Sometimes parents are lucky enough to have a child that is born perfectly healthy; other times, parents don’t have that luck, but do at least know what is wrong with their child.  Mr. and Mrs. Snider didn’t have a healthy child, nor did they have the comfort of knowing what exactly was wrong with their son, Martin.  They had brought him to doctor after doctor, and there was still no real diagnosis.  The doctors agreed on certain things though – Martin had profound mental retardation, his ears were big, his eyes were widely spaced apart, and he had an enlarged heart that would likely cut his life short.  For fourteen years, Martin’s condition was a mystery, until he and his mother were approached by a woman in the supermarket.

“She came right up to us,” Mrs. Snider told me.  “She wanted to say hello to Martin.  We got to talking, and I told her we weren’t sure what his condition was.  She said, ‘He has Coffin Lowry Syndrome.  Trust me.’”

That night Mrs. Snider went on the Internet and typed “Coffin Lowry” into a Google search.  All she had to see was one picture, and in that second, the mystery was solved.

“I looked at the picture,” she said, “and my heart stopped.  The boy looked exactly like my son.”

After Mrs. Snider told me this story, I too did a Google search of “Coffin Lowry.”  Like she said, it only took looking through some pictures to know what was wrong with Martin.  In image after image, I saw him.  The thick lips and eyebrows.  The sleepy look in the eyes.  The open-mouth smile.  There was my friend, obvious and apparent in each and every photo.  In reading about Coffin Lowry, I learned that the syndrome is rare, untreatable, and comes out of nowhere.  The disorder is caused by a mutation of a gene that isn’t passed down by either parent; in other words, it just happens, like raindrops without clouds or a fire without a spark.

Martin was the most needy student in the middle school classroom where I worked.  At lunch, I cut up his sandwich into small squares that he would eat with a fork.  I took Martin to the bathroom several times a day, sometimes to change him when he had an accident.  I held his hand when we walked down the hall.  Everyone in the school loved him.  Miss Tee, the classroom teacher, adored Martin.  The other students talked to him even though Martin couldn’t say anything other than “okay” or “bye bye.”  When Martin laughed, you laughed too.  He made people happy without trying.  It was something about his spirit, his energy, and the way he was with people.  He liked them.  There wasn’t a person – an adult or a student – that Martin Snider wasn’t happy to see.

Then one afternoon near the end of the school year, I brought Martin to the bathroom and he collapsed.  His hands started shaking and his lips turned white.  His eyes rolled back in his head.  It was one of the scariest moments of my life.  I ran out of the bathroom and called for help.  Martin ended up in the hospital, and I didn’t see much of him after that.  His mother came by the school to let us know he was all right, but didn’t go much into detail.  When he came back, he collapsed again.  Even through all that, he kept his big smile and his loud laugh.  He wasn’t there in June, on the last day of school, but Mrs. Snider brought him in to say goodbye for the summer.

“We really miss him,” Miss Tee said with a broad smile.  I missed him too.  He turned to his mother looking as happy as he had ever looked, and her eyes got misty.  She turned to him and said, “You hear that Martin?  Everybody loves you.  We’re not ready for you to go yet.”

Genetics is a strange thing.  It can produce perfect cheekbones, wonderful eyes, and an entire range of physical beauty.  Or it can somehow produce something else.  But perhaps it also can produce kindess and love, or at least I believe so, especially when I think about Mrs. Snider and her son Martin, holding hands and walking together out into the hot June day.

(In Self-Containment: Memories of a Teacher’s Assistant is my ongoing serial about the year I spent as a TA in a self-contained special ed middle school classroom.  The names of the students and teachers I talk about have been changed.  “Martin” is Part Five.)

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