MONTE SORRY

I’m a dirty hippie. My girl Michi tells me this and though I make arguments to the contrary I know, ultimately, that she’s right. (One of the “problems” with having friends who know you better than you know yourself.) Ultimately, I want to give the world a big, fat hug. Granted, I’ve got a bit too much New Yorker in me and so I don’t think everything can be solved practically with love (sometimes you have to kick a little ass to show that “gentle hopefulness” should not be taken for granted; also, if you cross someone I love, it’s just a whole lot o’ ugly) but when given the option between fighting and discussing, I’ll discuss almost every time. It’s safe to say I’m a bit more Montessori than Old School. I feel that hitting a child to make them more interested in a subject is counterintuitive. Frankly, if I got hit as an incentive to be better in school, I’d have probably turned out a lot more fucked up than I already am. As an adult, I have no interest in teaching anyone who doesn’t want to learn but I’m very interested in getting children excited about learning. Consequently, I’m of the “positive” reinforcement school of thought; if the kid feels good about her or his work, they always come back for more. Having gone to Reed College, I get that grades can, at best, be a bit of a hindrance to learning; learning being a life-long process and grades being a false terminus to said chronic process. Good grades lead to nothing but arrogance and bad grades lead to nothing but discouragement; neither of which breeds a good learner. To be a truly good student, I feel, that grades must be seen as irrelevant. Granted, in a real-life situation with goals that must be attained, I understand this is not even remotely the most effective perspective. Consequently, I try to be as willing as possible to tailor my immediate approach to the goal the students face.

However, the Chinese method seems to be more Old School than Montessori, in every way, which means that the children are accustom to coping within an Old School method. What they saw in me was the free reign that they were accustomed to having had with my predecessor. It would appear that my predecessor was built neither to handle harsh discipline methods nor harshly disciplined children suddenly liberated. He felt the most he had to offer the students in 45 minutes was a piece of paper for saying a single word of English. He felt his class was merely a “release” from all the stress of their lives. His self-proclaimed goal for each class was to make sure “they didn’t hurt themselves.”

I, being naively youthful, am trying to do more a little than that. Yes, the time with me is incredibly informal and overwhelmingly positive. Yes, I practice no severe discipline methods. However, I reward the children for making an active effort to conceptualize and then verbalize with English.

This is not to say I am right and the Chinese teachers are wrong. The Chinese teachers here do not have the luxury of being as conceptual and free with their thinking as I do. The Chinese teachers must have hard and fast results proven every month with the monthly citywide testing. Their job depends on it. I merely have to keep breathing and show up to class. Unfortunately for my Chinese counterparts, my school is testing far poorer than was anticipated and so my Chinese counterparts must work the children harder than before.

Nevertheless, it has been strange to be immersed in a world where corporal punishment is the norm. The children, at first, were unruly the moment they realized I was not about to put the smackdown on them. It is not unusual to see a teenage boy standing, facing the wall in a Middle School Teachers’ Office quietly crying to himself as a stern teacher continues to yell at him. It is not unusual to see small children having their hands’ or face slapped for every wrong answer they offer in the Primary School. So, not only am I physically foreign, I am emotionally foreign as well. At first glance, my methods are completely and utterly lax and the students took that as a license to be tyrannical. In fact, the young boys (6-8 years old) were really big on trying to grab my breasts and flipping me off. The obscene grabbing was so rampant amongst the second graders, the entire class had to be spoken to about it.

I had one particular encounter with a notably “naughty” boy. For some reason, the 10 year old was particularly keen on giving me a hard time. Week after week he was simply a nightmare with his running around and screaming and yelling obscenities (judging by the other students’ reactions) at me in Chinese. I tried ignoring him. I tried yelling at him. Nothing worked. We finally came to a head when he leapt at me, tried to grab my breasts and when I caught his hands just before contact he broke free of my grasp and flipped me off.

I had enough. I grabbed him by the arm and, literally, had to drag him out of the class. He allowed his whole body to go limp as I took him towards the door, intent on taking him to the principal’s office. He started screaming “No!” When screaming at me didn’t work, he started begging, “Please! Teacher, no! I’ll be better!” Suddenly the boy who knew no English was remarkably close to fluent.
Apparently, he’s got quite the reputation within the class as a problem. Consequently, when I was having trouble getting him out of the doorframe (that he had looney-tunes wrapped himself around) a series of boys did not hesitate to get up, grabbing him by the extremities and dragging him out of the class with me. There in the hallway, as my small group of boys is dragging the largest boy in their class down towards the principal’s office, my caravan and I meet up with the art teacher.

I pantomime to the art teacher what the kid did, the boy wrangling students explain in vibrant Chinese and she is horrified. She promises to take care of the situation and the boy, released, returns to his seat to be silent the rest of class. Quickly news spreads of what this boy has done. By the time I make it back to the Primary School English Teachers’ office that afternoon everyone knows what happened. Everyone apologizes on his behalf and explains to me how “naughty” the boy is. Judging by everyone’s reaction to what happened, I get the sense that no one has ever reported this boy’s behavior before. However, I can’t imagine why anyone would put up with such levels of shit from a child, especially in the land of corporal punishment.

Later in the week, the boy is commanded to apologize to me. The Western notion of “apologize” is not quite the same as the Chinese. I was brought in to the Homeroom Teachers’ Office and given a comfortable seat. All the teachers I have ever met and some who I had never seen appeared to witness the apology. The boy’s homeroom teacher (who, in spite of the gravity of the situation, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful he is; goddamned hormones) gave the boy a “stern” speaking to. He then commanded in Chinese that the boy to apologize to me in English, which the petrified boy did. This boy, who couldn’t be bothered to speak English in class suddenly produced, “I am very sorry, Christina.” The furious teacher then barked something else and the boy bowed deeply, not rising until I said, “I accept your apology and thank you for it.”

Now, I’ve been in rooms full of furious teachers before. I’ve never been a teacher in a room full of furious teachers. I’ve certainly never been the “special” teacher in a room full of furious teachers. Every teacher gave the boy dirty looks and “tsk-tsk” sounds. Everyone (including previously eye-contact-embargoing-hot-homeroom-teacher) looked at me and smiled kindly. It was incredibly surreal to be backstage like that. I have seen shunning like that but never been an openly accepted part of the society doing it. It was quite the intimidating abyss to see just how cauterized one can become when deemed unacceptable and how much of a conscious decision it is on the part of the society to shun. It’s not as though the rage aimed at the boy was overwhelming emotion and the shunning a visceral response to said emotion. Shutting the boy out was a calm, rational decision of the group. We certainly have our own equivalents of creepy, unsettling behavior in the West but this was something totally new to me.

However, now that boy is one of my most attentive students. Every time he sees me anywhere, he hollers out, “Hello Christina” and waves with his whole body. Every lesson I have in his class, he volunteers at least twice and does the best he can. He learned that though I may bend over backwards to help, if you fuck with me there will be consequences. And I learned that (for the moment; being a marginal man, I recognize that it is only a matter of time before the group turns on me) I now seem to have a whole crew willing to help me with said consequences.

I also learned that he is the son of the most powerful teacher in school. He had been running amuck because no one else dared openly complain for fear of retribution. The massive audience of teachers during my apology was the teachers the boy had offended but had not been able to complain. Fortunately for my political ignorance, sexual violation is beyond unacceptable here to say nothing of sexually violating a Western woman. So, political retribution, were there to be an issue of it if I had just complained about “bad behavior,” is now unthinkable. It’s very odd to know that I live in a world where, if I follow the rules, I am relatively safe.