Cry, Cry, Cry

Well I successfully made a student cry for the first time in my career yesterday. Okay, first the background. The class was a middle school one, so these kids are like 14 years old. One of the oddities (to Americans) in this culture are the punishments for misbehavior and forgetting to do homework. While I thought subtracting points from students' grades was a sufficient bulwark against skipping homework, I was told by my Director to make students kneel on their desks if they didn't do their homework. So I eventually got around to consistently doing as told. On Thursday I went around the room checking homework in their TOEFLing books and writing comments on their notes. When I got to one of my best students, she didn't have any notes written, only answers to questions. So I told her to kneel (typically I try to do this by simply tapping students' desk). This did not happen. Instead a surge of tears began and a surge of inner-conflict began for me. How to deal with a crying girl? Okay, so I should treat all students equally---and I was trying to. It just seemed like a horrible moment, standing there in front of the class with a disobeying (bad) but crying female student (sad). In this moment my brain was trying to wrack itself for any possible reason she wouldn't stand (knee problems? anxiety disorder?--there had to be a reasonable excuse). Eventually I attempted to quietly ask her what the problem was and then I went to ignoring her and continuing with the class. In true newbie fashion I'm pretty sure I made an Office Jim-like face to one of my students. In retrospect I should have simply and sternly asked her to sit outside. My mistake.

I did however attempt to get a full understanding (impossible as a Westerner) of the situation after class. I pulled her aside and talked quietly outside the class asking her what happened in class. Her response was to resume crying and hold her hand over her mouth (it's a Korean thing). I suppose it should have been obvious, but as a very good student she had never had to do the 'kneeling warrior desk pose' before. So she was suffering for sheer embarrassment and shame (in a land where your shame is your family's shame). I found this out after Seoul-jin, one of the Korean teachers talked to her. In any case I'm now glad I experienced this. The barrier has been broken and I'm on my way to a better response should this ever happen again.