“Please put the cell phone away Sally”. Two minutes later… “Sally, put away the cell phone now please”. Five more minutes… “Sally, put the cell phone away or I’ll throw it out the window”! She put it away. I turned back around from writing some non-sense about to-infinitives on the whiteboard, and guess what I saw…. a fucking cell phone. That was it. Biting my lower lip, I unmercifully ripped the phone from Sally’s puny, idol-worshiping hands. Fully enraged, she bounced up from her seat and screamed, “Teachahhhhh!! Teeeeaachhaaaaaaaaah!!!!! You can’t take that from me!!” A twelve year old getting up and yelling in my face? Borrowing from the colloquial expression of incredulity, oh no you fucking didn’t, bitch. I took a deep breathe, not for calming down, but to make sure that I had enough wind to blow her away in one foul swoop. My eyes widened, and for a moment I felt strangely like my father. Needless to say, I lost it, and the poor girl… oh, the poor girl. She started crying profusely, which kind of made things awkward for the other five students, so I gave back her cell phone, and tried to continue teaching, which was pointless. She ripped off the phone’s plastic case (to avoid catching the crazy foreigner disease), and continued crying like a little girl. She was after all, a little girl.
For ten minutes, the charade of outpouring continued. I’d expect this kind of crap from a kinder, but a twelve year old? Are you effing serious!? Given the amount that she cried, I wonder if anyone had yelled at her like that before. I almost started to feel bad, until one of the Korean secretaries poked her head into the classroom. No doubt she heard the yelling, and was probably just checking to see that there were still six children in the classroom. As I calmly discussed Mary Pope Osborne’s Dinosaurs After Dark with the other students, Sally was still crying with her head down on the desk, . The secretary looked confused. “Cell phone,” I said pointing to Sally. The secretary understood immediately. She walked over to Sally, picked her head off the desk, and — while she was still crying — slapped her across the face, twice. “Holy shit,” I remember thinking. More yelling, this time in Korean, and once again things got awkward for the rest of us. After the secretary left, I handed Sally a tissue. She threw it on the floor, refusing to look at me the rest of class. She was done crying at least.
Maybe 15 minutes later, the head Korean teacher made an appearance, and before she could even get to Sally, she noticed two students (boy and girl) sharing a storybook. I usually let them because its clear the girl likes the boy. Anyways, the head teacher asks the boy where his storybook is and he says, “I don’t have”. The head teacher, having encountered these situations before, walks over to the boy, dumps his backpack out onto the floor, and guess what she found… a fucking storybook. Literally picking him up by the ears, she shook him up and down like a can of spray paint. When the head teacher asked the boy to explain himself, he didn’t say two words before she slapped him across the face, shoved him into the wall, and tore him a new hahn gook. Then, she drags both he and the girl out of class, hits their knuckles with a 24″ wooden stick, and makes them serve out the rest of class hands above their heads in the lobby. “Jesus Christ!” I remember thinking. Other than that, lately it’s been pretty dry.