just scratching the surface

i could make this post SO much longer. this isn’t the only incident of it’s kind, but i feel like posting some of the silliness i’ve seen in the past few days.

we’ve got some crazies in our midst. i work for a private hagwon. the parents pay a substantial tuition fee for their child to attend our school, and it makes for a sometimes awkward blend of education and business.

we often bend to the desires of the parents in ways that are undesirable and sometimes ridiculous.

i have a student in one of my kindy classes. she can be quite the brat. (on a side note- she has a fingernails on the chalkboard voice that i’m thinking of recording in order to use as my alarm.) on the bus she started a fight with an older boy. from what i understand, she hit him in the face, and his knee-jerk reaction resulted in him scratching her forehead.

not a gash. . . but a decent fingernail scratch. i didn’t actually see it dripping blood, but it was red and you could’ve blotted away blood. nothing big. or so you would think.

(which leads to a slight tangent- there have been three or four recent fingernail scratch incidents. i clipped the nails of one of my students who drew blood from another teacher while fooling around. a couple of teachers mentioned that we should send out a memo reminding the parents to check their kid’s nails. --the part that got under my skin is that these parents can be so meticulous about what is happening to their child in class, yet they glance over performing basic hygiene care on their kid. . . . priorities people.)

so, now this girl has a scratch on her forehead. it might not matter so much, but she’s kinda packing a ‘five-head’ so it might be more apparent than average. the school puts a bandage on it and notifies both sets of parents that there has been an altercation.

the boy has been in trouble before, and his mom is known to shrug it off. so, this could actually work well for us in the entertainment/ karmic way.

the boy’s mom blew off the first phone call, but after the girl’s family was notified her tone changed a bit. suddenly she was apologetic. to no avail. muhahahahahaha

we’ve dealt with this girl’s parents before. she showed up at school one morning with a couple large mosquito bites. i asked her about them and she told me and my teaching partner that she got them over the weekend. after she went home we got a call from her father demanding that we explain how we let her get mosquito bites at school, ‘why are the windows open? why aren’t there screens to keep the bugs out? why aren’t we properly protecting his daughter?’

we tried to tell him that she said she got them at home. we tried to tell him that the windows weren’t open because we were running the AC, but in the end the school could only apologized to appease him.

so, back to the day of the incident. . .

first her grandmother showed up. then her other grandmother. her aunt made an appearance. . . and her parents finally. they rushed out to buy her $50 skin rejuvenation cream. . . she was in and out of class meeting with family members and changing her bandage. after school they rushed her to a dermatologist to see if she would need PLASTIC SURGERY!

it is possible that her long term goals of being a forehead model are squashed.

the girl’s family gave the school a hard time, gave the bus teacher a hard time. . . and the boy’s family- well, it’s still not over. i believe they’ve written up a contract to ensure damages paid if she needs plastic surgery and they are trying to push for extra damages paid for their distress and shock.

the bandage she is wearing on her head is more attention getting than the actual scratch. so she’s upset that kids are making fun of her. neither my teaching partner or myself has heard anyone make fun of her. in fact, i’m pretty sure she’s really digging all the attention. but her parents think maybe she shouldn’t be in school because her feelings are getting hurt.

yeah, maybe she shouldn’t.

maybe she should live in a bubble and not interact with anyone directly. . . .ever.

it would be nice if this was an isolated incident. . . but it’s far from. FAR FROM.

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on another note- i just lost one of my favorite students because her mom feels she is too stressed out to be in our kindergarten.

she’s six years old and she’s taking seven classes outside of our kindy which lasts from 9:30-2. i don’t know what all the outside classes were, but one of them was chinese offered at our after school program. . . and she was in the midst of signing up for korean writing class at our after school program. suddenly the mom thought that the kindy homework was too much to deal with.

right.

i think scientists need to work on ‘common sense in a can’ . . . aerosol, beverage, whatever.


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mom, dad, remember when i petitioned to change my bedtime from 7:30 or 8pm/ to 9 or 9:30pm when i was in 6th grade- i was 12?

i made a colored bar graph of all the bedtimes of my friends to show how uncommon my early bedtime was.

in contrast i have ten year old students in my elementary classes that regularly go to bed at 11pm or 12am. and apparently, that is common across the board.

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my head hurts. . . and i think it’s more than my annoying sinuses. nighty night.