Wow, your grasp of the obvious stuns me.
(This one could almost go in the Rants category, because it’s kind of mean. But it’s also about a student, so it’s going here.)It seems that everybody in Korea with anything over a 32″ waist is considered fat. I don’t even know the last time mine was that small, so I guess that means I’ve been fat forever. Students (and adults, in certain settings) seem to delight in pointing out who’s fat and who’s not – but only if that person is a foreigner. I’ve yet to hear of a student willing to tell a Korean teacher they’re fat. And we’ve got some who are quite portly. When I ask students why they don’t, they say it’s not nice.
HELLO?!?
Aren’t you the same little shit who just called me fat? “Oh, it’s different with them, teacher.”
Yeah, I’ll fucking bet it is. They’ve got a stick and will beat you silly if you insult them, that’s how “different” it is.
Since I’m teaching without the benefit of a plank of wood, I get my hits in verbally. Sometimes I’m very mean, and I know I shouldn’t do it, but how else are they going to learn that insulting people hurts? What better way than to dish it back and see how they like it?
Take tonight for instance. There’s this one 9th-grader who’s decided to hate me. Seems she took great offense to my suspecting her of cheating while we were playing Bingo last week. (They like it, and it makes for easy – and sometimes informative – lessons.)
She’s always talking with her friends in class and decides to rip on me after I tell her to be quiet. “Teacher, you’re fat!”
“You may be right,” I tell her, “but at least I can diet and get thin. You’ll always be ugly and your head will always be too big.”
(For the record, she’s a bit unpleasant to look at and does have a large head – the kiss of death for Korean girls who want to be “pretty.”)
She and her friends all stopped talking in mid-jabber. I got a horde of evil looks – all rightfully deserved – but they didn’t bother me a bit. I’d stung back like she didn’t think I could and dammit if it didn’t feel good.
Am I wrong to take pleasure in stomping on her heart?
Perhaps, but she’s gotta learn this lesson sooner or later, so why shouldn’t I get something out of it? Doing this probably makes me a horrible person, but how else do you deal with a silly little twit who thinks she can say whatever she wants with impunity? Ignore her? Not likely. She’ll just try even harder to get a rise out of me. I can’t very well hit her, and trying to get a Korean teacher to discipline her for what she does in my class just reinforces how little authority I actually have.
I doubt I’ll get any heat over this either. If I do? So what? She deserved it and I’ll happily say that I’d do it again. What are they going to do, tell me I can’t talk to the students when they misbehave?