Smile Like You Mean It

I made Jae Min cry today. I’m going to hell, teacher’s hell. Well, I may have made him cry; it was possibly a combination of Kim and I that caused the tears to flow down his cherub cheeks. Jae Min was being silly in class, hiding under a desk, actually believing that I didn’t see him. My recent strategy has just been to start class and ignore the rouge child. ( I have an older student that liked to hid behind the white board in one of the classrooms.) He was lying on the floor between a couple of desks. After a while, he was annoyed that I wasn’t pay attention to him (like all kids, he wants to be caught, he wants the attention) and he started playing on his cell phone. I continued to ignore him. He turned up the volume. I ignored him. He turn the up the volume again. I kicked him out of class, with much yelling and anger. When he came back in at the end of class, I saw Kim standing out in the hallway, I assume he gave Jae Min a lecture. As Jae Min started packing up his stuff, he started to sniffle and then he cried, hard. I felt so bad. He’s just a little boy. I made him cry. I’m a bully.
Jae Min and posse excluded (that class almost makes me cry every time I had to teach them, three times a week!), I mostly like my classes. There is one class of elementary kids that I love, four sweet boys and one sweet girl. Of the boys there is Harry (a newly acquired name) who is quite and shy and never causes problems and all the kids like him as much as I do. There is Eric, formally Herry (yes with an “e”), who is loud and doesn’t listen very well, but is ultimately a good kid and super adorable, and then Mike and Sunny both of whom were previously in a lower level and both of whom I totally adore. The girl, Olivia is as sweet as her name and doesn’t let the boys push her around.
Last week, after a particularly bad day with Jae Min and posse, I let this class do nothing for almost an entire class. I just let them ask me questions and I asked them lots of questions. We didn’t even finish the first page of the unit. Then I did the same thing with the following writing class. It was very much a bad teacher thing for me to do. I have become increasing bad at controlling my classes and actually getting work done. I have started a decent in to apathy and need to come back. I am an uncaring teacher, I like my kids, but I’m sick of trying to teach them.
And Sarah cancelled Boys Before Flowers this week! Sally, who hates the show, offered to watch it with me. She felt badly because she was supposed to go on a walk with me this morning, but coudn't do ti because she got really bad blisters from a pair of new, too small Chuck Taylors that she bought this weekend. Which reminds me, I also bought a new pair of chucks this weekend. This week we are getting pizza, or perhaps we’ll go to a hof after the show, or maybe I’ll make kimchi pancakes, which I can do now. I use a mix, which is startlingly like regular pancake mix. I though it would be different. Less sweet, I guess. The mix just needs water, kimchi (obviously), and veggies of your (my) choice. It is a popular hof food (to me anyway) and I was very surprised at how easy it is to make. (I learned in a Listening class today that Kimchi is one of the healthyist foods in the world. However, the book may be published by a Korean company, which makes the information some what unreliable. I have notied some phrasing and odd usage that is eerily simialr to how many Koreans speak English.)
And while I’m ranting about school, I am starting to see more and more the middle school politics between girls. He-Jin, for example, is always really mean to Ta-Bin and it makes me really angry and I don’t know now to stop it. She does her best to make Ta-Bin, a sweet girl and a good student, feel stupid and childish. He-Jin is kind of bitch and I don’t want her to be rude to Ta-Bin. I get so annoyed He-Jin’s behaviour.
And my new favourite pastime: creating romances between my students, Korean romances. For example, Ta-Bin and Gi-Joo. Ta-Ban, a bright and studious girl, eager to learn and smart. Gi-Joo, sleeps all class. Unlikely? I think so. Romantic? Definitely! Gi-Joo needs an English tutor and for some reason, he is convinced that Ta-Bin is the way to way to passing the ultra important English test that he must pass or his parents are going to send him to live with some relatives in the country, which will take him away from his beloved, his beloved, or something important, dance team, hip-hop dance troupe! They are the best and will win the competition that they want to enter with a huge award, like dancing in a Big Bang music video (Big Bang cameo!), but he is the leader and they need him, so he has to pass the ultra important test. Gi-Joo needs Ta-Bin to tutor him because she doesn’t go to his school and for some reason, nobody at his school can know that he needs a tutor. It would ruin his reputation or something. They meet at English hagwon. Ta-Bin and Gi-Joo fight a lot, they can’t get along and try to be as hurtful as possible to each other. And he has to black mail her into helping him, that is the only way. She did something and he will tell her parents. She, she... she has a part time job about which her parents can’t know. They would be so angry. No-no, she continues to play on the soccer on which her parents forbade her to play because soccer was taking away from her study time. Gi-Joo threatens to tell her parents about the soccer team unless she tutors him. Also, she needs the money (that he pays her for tutoring) because she needs new soccer cleats. They fall in love as they fight. Love is almost hate after all. Then they are separated by something tragic and strange and potentially involving He-Jin, who is in love with Gi-Joo , to whom she is connected by some mysterious past event. I haven’t figured that part out at this point, but it has to be random and make you go “what the hell?” Eventually they are brought back together by either fate (cop-out) or some super complex scheme concocted by their friends to which they are totally oblivious. That right there is an award winning treatment, almost. Once I get the kinks ironed out, I’ll write the screenplay. This is classic Korea drama. Hagwon Romance. Hazzah!