Sometimes my students surprise me.
I’ve been working at the boys’ middle school full-time since March and it has given me the opportunity to get to know the students pretty well. Teaching them is not always easy, but there have been several occasions that my students have really surprised and impressed me.
In Korea, roughhousing is not against the rules the way it is in America. Things happen every day in my school that would result in suspension or expulsion at the schools I went to as a kid. Kids are allowed to play rough and have fun, and I have about one kid in every class at all times with a broken arm or leg to prove it. But I think it’s better this way. It’s frustrating not being able to express yourself physically in your adolescence, and even if they get hurt doing stupid things, I think it’s worth it.
The flip side of that is that, since my Korean isn’t great, and I don’t always know who is friends with whom, it’s hard for me to tell when the students are just fooling around, and when one of them isn’t in on the joke. I have no idea what to do when they are chasing each other around the room, laughing while shrieking, “Teacher! Help me! Help me! He kill me!” Two or three times it has been really obvious and I have peeled some bully off of a kid he was picking on. But the other day, I misjudged a situation. In my class, a few feet away from my desk, a couple of kids were wrestling on the floor before class started. But one kid in my class who doesn’t seem “popular” but is really a leader just went over to them, nudged the aggressor away, and helped up the kid who wasn’t having fun. Totally cool, didn’t say a word. His face just said, “Come on, guys.” I felt bad that I didn’t intervene, but was happy that this kid did.
There’s one kid in my school who is “special needs.” I’m not sure what his disability is. He doesn’t appear to have Down syndrome or autism. He kind of reminds me of a guy I used to work with who had suffered some brain damage in a car accident as a child. This boy seems alert, but doesn’t say anything. There’s another kid who is small and painfully shy; he never speaks above a whisper. And I’m kind of surprised how much the other students rally around them. Obviously, like I said above, bullying happens, but it doesn’t happen to these two.
Plenty of kids don’t speak up in class, so I didn’t know there was anything unusual about the second kid until one day last year. We were playing a game where the kids had to line up in two lines and race each other to answer a question. It was the shy boy and another kid. The other kid answered first but got it wrong. Then the shy kid whispered the correct answer to me. When I pointed to him as the winner, every kid in the class, on both teams, started cheering. It was amazing.
There was another time, I did an activity where each table had to draw a random slip of paper and fill in the blank to read the sentence out loud. We had done a few rounds when one table decided they would have their teammate, the special needs boy, read the sentence for the team. With their help, he did it, and everyone in the class cheered. He got a standing ovation.
Middle school boys don’t come to mind when I think about groups of people who are exceptionally generous towards people who are different, but sometimes they surprise you.
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