CRACKIN’ THE WHIP

In my class, there are precisely two things I do not tolerate; the first is violence and the second is undermining my authority. I love to provide the kids with fun and games and make the class a safe environment but like I said before, sometimes “gentle hopefulness” in a classroom does need teeth behind it. Frankly, I simply cannot condone violence between students. I know that kids are more physical than adults but I simply cannot allow one student to hit another in my presence. It’s a moral call on my part but it’s my classroom and it bothers me to the point of distraction to see a child get hit by another child. As for the respect thing, I do not tolerate any disrespect towards me as that sets a destructive precedent in which students learn they may be disrespectful towards foreigners with no consequences. That is a strange thing for me to enforce because I’m accustom to dealing with equal adults and if peers feel the need to disrespect me, I just laugh at them. Disrespect amongst adults only carries weight if you let it matter to you. Disrespect amongst children, while rather similar in that if it flusters you they keep doing it, when left unchecked sets patterns of behavior. Consequently, I punish them quickly and am done with it.

My punishment comes in several stages. The first stage is that they are told to stop and the item fought over is removed, the fighting kids are separated or the disrespectful kid is singled out. If that doesn’t work then I have them stand at attention by the door. If that doesn’t work, I send them to the dreaded “outside” where they must stand in hallway (and pray that a Chinese teacher does not come along) for five minutes. If that doesn’t work or they clearly are doing things to flaunt their disrespect of me, I banish them to hallway for an unknown and lengthy period of time. The key to maintaining a productive and loving relationship with my students seems to be that once the punishment is over it’s done. If the student has been punished and chooses to join the class after his or her punishment, they are welcomed back in like nothing happened.

It has taken me over three months of keeping my cool, being really sweet and projecting over the din but I’m finally beginning to have some control with a few of my classes while maintaining their profound affection for me. I am actually able to teach a lesson that they remember and use with me outside of class as well as in the next class with classes I couldn’t even get to sit down before. It’s no giant leap for mankind but it’s everything to me.

Nevertheless, the worst class for me to wrangle in the primary school is my little monkeys’ class. I love them dearly but they are crazy. It’s been a lot of work but I’m finally getting several of them to sit down and pay attention. However, some of the boys are really nuts. Yesterday (11/6) one of the boys really pushed me. He was beating up on a smaller boy and I have no tolerance for that. However, being the Jude’s daughter, I know that generally if one kid is getting hit by another kid (that isn’t a bully) chances are there is a good reason the fists are flying. (When we would run to her crying, “Mom! [Insert Sibling’s Name] Hit Me!” she would respond with, “What did you do to deserve it?” She was right in that it’s near impossible to sort out all the crap and it’s certainly not cost effective to get involved in the minutia when all you want is the violence to stop.) So, I make the two students stand up in front of the class together.

As they stand there, considering the dynamic revealed, it’s pretty clear who’s prepared to let it go and who’s holding the grudge. And it became clear with the two boys fighting yesterday who was prepared to let it go and who wasn’t. I sent the boy who calmed down back to his seat and the larger boy stood at the front of the class a little longer. Then I sent him back to his seat.

I watched him walk back to his seat and then proceed to pound on the little one again. Consequently, I had to peel him off the little boy and throw him out. My “Mean Teacher Chinese” is quite fluent. I am amazed at the kind of things I can express when my blood is up and wish I had that capacity in my everyday life.

I yell (all in Chinese), “Get out” as the boy sheepishly walks out the door and then I point to the wall across from where I teach (so I can keep an eye on him) “Stand there.” The boy takes his place in the hall and turns to face me. “You just earned yourself five minutes.” The boy hung his head, admitting defeat. I took a deep breath and let it go because once it’s done, it’s done and there’s no point in holding a grudge.

I shot the boy one final stern look on the off chance he was being deceptively naughty and had looked up defiantly. He had not so I dropped the stern look and then looked up. Who is standing there but Alpha Hottie. Considering the speed with which Alpha Hottie lowered his gaze in the same manor the little boy had just done and then hustled by, it was safe to say that he had witnessed the whole thing.
To be frank, I’m glad that some teacher witnessed me being the bearer of bad news and not just basking in being the adored foreign teacher here only for a good time. I try not to shuck the less pleasant pieces of my job off on to other people; it’s just not fair to be the party person all the time while other people have to do your dirty work. However, I did lack certain abilities in Chinese and therefore needed the Chinese teachers to help me on certain less pleasant aspects of my job. Fun is easy. Discipline requires a bit more verbal power than I have had until quite recently. Methods of discipline have been the topic of conversation with me of late and I get the sense that my predecessors have set a rather low bar in terms of classroom control and rather high in terms of disapproval and judgment of corporal punishment. (Like I said, I don’t think that corporal punishment is bad, per say, I just am not comfortable with doing it myself if for no other reason than I am not calibrated for it nor would it have been effective for me as a student.) In other words, I think that my predecessors were really fond of lecturing the teachers on the ills of corporal punishment and seeing themselves as the great white hope to offer the students “a moment of release from their very hard lives” (be clear, no child wealthy enough to attend my exclusive, wait-listed, expensive private school leads a wholly neglected lifestyle; sure they have the standard traumas and horrors of childhood but they also have access to a far more resources than most children in China) and yet my predecessors were utterly dependent on said corporal punishment doled out by others as the device to keep their students in line. Putting my students in the hallway to be found by corporal punishment wielding teachers is my absolute final line of defense, not my first. I’ll sort out my own issues, thank you. Frankly, the greatest gift feminism ever gave me is the ability to fight my own battles and so my absolute last resort is letting someone else fight for me.
However, my vanity was a bit wounded in that it was Alpha Hottie to catch me disciplining my students. “Mean teacher” is not really what I think of as one of my “finer” moments. It needs to be done and it’s nothing I plan on apologizing for but it’s certainly nothing you want the hot guy to catch you doing… especially now that I seem to have fallen off Alpha Hottie’s radar completely. Since Picture Day, also the day in which the true dynamic of me as “powerful figure” was revealed, Alpha Hottie has stopped watching me. On picture day, the men who run the school that none of the teachers would approach casually all went through the chain of propriety and asked to have individual pictures taken with me. My casual nature aside, my true position within the ranks of teachers was fully articulated.
I figured, as I’ve lost his attention and now he’s seen me be mean to a little kid, I should definitely abandon all hope.

However, as I was strolling back to my office right after “Mean Teacher” class, we passed each other in the hallway and he was looking at me from behind the mask. I looked at him and nodded politely, not saying “Ni hao.” I always initiate the hellos but of late he’s only been nodding instead of returning my hello. As I look back up at him after nodding, he was still staring at me from behind the mask.
Feeling like the world was seeing me as a mean old hag who picks on little children for kicks, I looked at his mask like a Westerner would and figured he simply did not want to deal with me. So, I looked away, defeated and continued to walk towards him. I did everything I could not to cringe as he approached me to go the other way.

As our shoulders passed by each other, he said “hello,” quietly.

It was the first word of English he has ever spoken to me. I could have done cartwheels down the hallway. Who knew being a bitch could yield such wonderful results?