not as perceptive as you think you are

My co-workers keep telling me how much I love my students these days. I think: but haven't I always loved them? But didn't I love them more those first months at school?

Here is the story in four stages:

Stage 1: When I first came to Seoul Electronics High School last September, the students were strange to me, and I was strange to them. Just catching sight of me was enough to throw them into hysterics, and the prospect of teaching a class full of them was a fearful thing for me. For a few months I had a sort of crush on all my students; I did not see their faults and only saw my own.

Stage 2: After a while, I started seeing things I didn't like about my students. I saw their homophobia and their fat-phobia and their bullying tendencies and their disregard for the people around them. (Obviously, these do not apply to all of my students, or in equal parts to the students they do apply to -- I am simply naming characteristics [which I see as negative] that are fairly common at my school.) I scolded/punished these things when they occurred in my classroom but generally tried to forget about them after the fact so that I could continue to be in love with my students.

Stage 3: When the second semester came, my after school class started, and with it the necessity of managing and punishing a group of (largely) very naughty students. At first, I tried to rely solely on positive reinforcement; that failing, I scolded them a lot and warned them a lot and then gave out a fair number of punishments. For a while, I partially succeeded, but also fell out of love with a number of my students in the process. I was tired of their rudeness to me in and out of class, and I was tired of hearing their false excuses for skipping class. And even though the majority of my students were not the ones causing me the stress, my frustration at my after-schoolers bled over a little into my attitude towards the entire student body.

Stage 4: I stopped fighting with my after school students. I came to the conclusion that without the help of their homeroom teachers, there was nothing more I could do to induce them to come to my class or to behave respectfully (to me and to their peers) during the class. I accepted that they had not wanted to sign up for the class in the first place, and I stopped paying attention to them, instead concentrating solely on the diligent students who did/do desire to study English with me.

From the point I stopped fighting, we have slowly progressed to now. I love my students, really. Almost all of them I love; there are only a few who are hard to forgive, whose faces I am not happy to see when I pass them in the hallways. There is also a small but not insignificant percentage of students that I still have crushes on, the sweet, sweet students who still get excited every time we meet, who wouldn't be caught dead not paying attention in class, who say "Sorry, Teacher" when their classmates won't quiet down.

The majority of the students, though, I do not have crushes on, but I am still happy to see them and happy to enter their classrooms. My love for them is a calm, well-rounded love. I know them better than I knew them before. I love them for their silliness and find the process of waking them up for class endearing, and I can recognize the things I dislike about them without hating them for it. I like this stage.