Last year, I had a bit of a meltdown. I was teaching a 6th period Friday class, by myself (my co-teacher was stuck dealing with a severe troublemaker from her homeroom class), and it was a grade 3 class. Also, my brain was slowly cooking at 102 degrees. I had been trying to teach them idioms, and failing. The kids just got bored and kept talking, talking, talking…I reached my breaking point, snapped, and shouted, FINE! WE WILL DO NOTHING FOR THE REST OF CLASS! and sat down in a huff.
I regretted that experience and swore I would never lose my cool again. I feel like that incident lost me a lot of respect (well, if there was any to lose in the first place. I think it just plummeted into negative values). I worked hard to be a better teacher, analyzing exactly what had gone wrong in that situation, and developed strategies to overcome these issues. For instance, don’t try to make the 3rd graders do anything difficult after exams! Also, don’t have any high expectations for the last class at the end of the week. I got a little better (really, just a teensy bit) at classroom management, and had strategies for controlling their behavior. I even pitied the other foreign teachers who had just arrived, and were having serious issues with bad students. I felt good about the fact that I have a good bond with my kids, and that I can actually teach them things.
Well, sometimes if you’re feeling too good about life, you need a big ol slap in the face to bring you back to reality.
This past week, Ive just been doing Halloween related stuff. It’s my favorite holiday, and many of the Korean students love it as well. They love candy and they love creepy things. So I pulled out all the stops, particularly for my grade 1 classes. I decorated the classroom with cobwebs and spiders and such, had them do toilet paper mummy races, and make their own jack o lanterns by drawing faces onto orange balloons. The coup de grace was the murder mystery lesson; my riff on the mystery boxes containing the eyes and other body parts of a witch (actually peeled grapes, cold oily spaghetti, etc). I had the students guess what body parts were in the boxes, and then come up with a story about what had happened to the witch.
This lesson had gone over like gangbusters with two of my grade 1 classes. By the time I got to 1-1 at the end of Thursday, however, a few of them had already talked to their buddies in the other classes, so of course they shouted teacher! Box 1 is tofu, box 2 is noodle, box 3 is grape! Wonderful. Those were the kids that were paying attention. Most of them were excited about the boxes (they’re still kids, after all) but they still didnt do the work, and just rolled their eyes at me whenever I came by and made them do their worksheets. One kid even said a bad word to me in Korean, because I wouldn’t give him candy. The whole lesson was a huge struggle to get them to be quiet enough so that I could even hear myself talking. Mind you, there were two adults in the room – myself and my co-teacher. It was kind of demoralizing.
The particular straw that broke this camels back dropped right after class. At the end of class, I had instructed them to clean up their tissues and any other trash that had accumulated during the (highly messy) class. Afterwards, I was busy with some of the students who were scheming candy from me, and I saw that a bunch of them had rushed over to the boxes. Then they left, and I saw it : a big pile of spaghetti that had fallen on the floor. OH NO THEY DIDNT. I grabbed the two last kids to leave the classroom – the big kid that had said a bad word to me before, and his buddy from the remedial class who had wandered in and had like no clue at all what was going on, and dragged them back over to the boxes. PICK THIS UP, I yelled, seething. I might have even yelled at them to eat it (I had made a rule earlier that if a student takes any of the body parts out of the box, they have to eat it, to discourage messes). The boy who had cursed at me earlier, a huge beefy kid who would grow nicely into a high school quarterback if he lived in America, looked at me with genuine fear in his eyes, grabbed his buddy and ran. He picked up the spaghetti, but the mental damage was done. One of my many unfortunate tendencies is to cry like a cantankerous infant when I am angry, so yep, that’s what I did.
(I really, REALLY hate that, by the way. It is SO not intimidating or badass. Mostly, like a friend on FB pointed out, anger-crying just obliterates the worth of any message you are trying to get across and makes you look like a crazy.)
After they left, some students ran in from another grade 1 class, yelling trick or treat! Then one of them saw the dark, evil look on my face, said sorry and ordered his companions out of the classroom. I just kind of stewed for awhile, pissed about the rudeness of the class and crying and ripping down the cobwebs and other things. I had officially lost it.
During cleaning time, my students were quite nice. One kid who is normally kind of a knucklehead in class was really sweet to me, standing around my desk and fending off other random students hunting for candy. Another kid, who is in the remedial class and whose English level is low, asked his buddy to help him translate the question he had for me: “are you okay, Teacher?” He’s been a little darling since then, popping his head in during class breaks and saying “hello teacher! Have a good day!”
Happily, Friday went a lot better. I see only grade 3s that day. At the beginning of the year, I would have never expected that I would be relieved at the prospect of only teaching 3rd graders post exams. Bizarrely enough, ever since their middle school grades have been finalized, they have been angels. A far cry from last year, where I was counting down the number of times I met with the grade 3s through the end of the semester.
My two pets are in that disaster grade 1 class. Actually, I like a lot of the students in that class, and it used to be one of my favorites. I dont know what happened or where I went wrong. Their homeroom teacher yelled at them on Friday, telling them they had sent the English teacher home early, bawling. (Oh, wunderbar.) The worst thing is that I can’t really point to one incident or student to explain why I was so upset, so the students dont really understand what they did wrong. According to my pets, the general story is that some girls threw spaghetti on the floor, which made me cry. I don’t know exactly why the girls were implicated, though I have complained a lot about the girls in that class before, so perhaps my coteacher just assumed that to be the case.
I think I needed to snap – its been hectic, what with Eli leaving for a few months (he’ll be back, but after the harsh Korean winter) and every single night this past week Ive stayed out late for social obligations: Eli’s going away party, potluck, etc. Also, I had missed lunch that day to prepare those stupid mystery boxes! Lack of sleep, lack of food, and lack of student respect makes a girl go c.r.a.z.y…
I’m a little nervous about seeing that class again on Tuesday, and I think the students are, too. I haven’t really seen any of them except for my pets, and even they were a little nervous about coming in to my classroom, peeking their heads in the door cautiously. I have decided to stop teaching them fun lessons, though, and have them work from the textbook for awhile. It seriously bites to invest a lot in lesson plans, only to be met with indifference and rudeness. I do feel bad for the students who still care and participate – my pets, many of the boys in class and a handful of the girls. It’s not their fault their classmates are sociopaths.
Seven more weeks until the end of school….
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