Remember the "OK!" and "I love you!" student?
I had him in class again last Friday, and he was rowdy as usual. He continued to be ridiculous ("I love you!" "Teacher, you are beautiful!" etc). I'm still not very good at dealing with those of my students who think the answer to surviving English class is flattering me to extremes. How can I make them stop being ridiculous without discouraging them from speaking altogether?
Anyway, the "OK!" guy is pretty hilarious, has a stable group of friends, and always comes across as very outgoing and confident about himself. On Friday, as he was having one of his usual bursts of rowdiness and demanded my attention once again, I felt it was safe to tease him a little. I do that occasionally with the rowdier students. (Is it wrong of me to do that?) My reasoning has been something like this: the rowdier students are sometimes/often being rowdy because they want attention from me. By teasing them, I am focusing my attention on them, and maybe that satisfies them. When they are being particularly rowdy, they often attract the attention of the entire class, and a slight tease usually makes everyone (including the person being rowdy) laugh, and it directs the classes attention back to me so that we can continue with the activity.
I never thought I'd said anything really hurtful. It was never my intention to make anyone feel bad, but simply to refocus the class. If a student says, "I love you!", for example, I might tease them by saying, "Oh, really? If you really love me, then give me candy" (holding out my hands in a cup to receive the candy). The response is something like "sorry!", at which point I feign disappointment and carry on with the class.
This strategy usually seems to work perfectly, and so it's become something of a habit. None of my rowdy students have seemed to be discouraged by it before.
So I teased "OK!" a little on Friday, and everything seemed fine. The class was split up into groups at the time, so the teasing was heard by him and the group of friends that he was working with. "OK!" laughed, his friends laughed, I laughed and redirected their attention back to the questions they were supposed to be asking each other. Everything seemed fine.
But today, "OK!" saw me coming out of the subway, didn't greet me and whipped his head around to avoid me. That's bad, rude even. School etiquette says he should have said "hello" or "안녕하세요" (which is how they would greet their Korean teachers). And usually, if "OK!" sees me in the hallways or in the subway or at my desk he always greets me and comes over to chat me up. So the fact that he ignored me means he is substantially angry at me.
Fuck, I thought, and then nearly started crying on the way to school. I really did wish he would stop saying "I love you!" constantly, but I never meant to hurt his feelings or make him angry or discourage him from speaking English. I'm sure I've annoyed some of my students before, but I didn't think I'd done anything to anger or hurt them. How do I fix it? What if I can't?
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3 comments:
Do you think he'd understand you if you approached him and told you were just teasing? Or would that be socially awkward?
Hrm, otherwise, maybe the next time he says something in English class, you could be extra nice or extra encouraging. Gahhh, what a tough situation!
The problem is, there are extremely few students who I could approach with a question other than "How are you?" and "What's your hobby?" and have them understand. "OK!"'s English level is really low. He would have no idea what I was saying if I said the word "tease." Maybe "joke," but maybe not. And the extreme language barrier would make approaching him way more awkward than it would be in the first place.
I definitely plan on acting very friendly and encouraging toward him when I see him in class this Friday. But my concern is: what if he just doesn't say anything in class? That seems like a fairly likely possibility to me, despite how active he was in class before. In that case, I have to think of ways to encourage him even if he stays silent.
update: turns out I jumped the gun a bit on my perception of "OK!"'s relationship with his classmates. He is quite a boisterous and comedic guy, but also appears to react differently to a number of situations than most of his peers do. So he is very outgoing, but also a bit socially awkward.
Today it appeared that he is subject to at least a little bit of teasing from his classmates. He didn't seem fazed by their teasing, but it is something I didn't notice before. I am now guessing that I hit a sore spot for him, that my teasing in addition to the teasing from his classmates might have made him feel disapproved of and unwanted by everybody.
"OK!" was active in class today. In a broken conversation that happened at intervals during groupwork, he and his groupmates conveyed to me that teasing made him angry. I conveyed that I understood, and when his classmates called him crazy, I said "No, not crazy." (I'll have to get back some other time about the confusing ways in which "crazy" is used as a joke/insult amongst my students.) We are back on friendly terms now, I think. He offered me a piece of gum in the subway, that's a pretty good sign.
Teasing is much more widely used in nearly every social interaction in Korea than I have been accustomed to before. Every day I see students teasing other students and teachers teasing other teachers and teachers teasing their students and students teasing their teachers. I have learned to accept all of the teasing that comes my way without really taking it personally, and I occasionally engage in teasing of my close teacher-friends and, as I've said, of my students.
I need to be more careful about this, nevermind that my co-teachers are not careful about it. I need to make sure that I only joke around with the students who have given me clear indications that they want to be joked with. I need to make sure I am making people feel accepted, never alienated.
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