The One and Only...Frank

I finally got a picture of my 'beloved' 4th grade student Frank. He is one of the most ridiculous children you will ever meet in your life. I think you can even tell this by just looking at him. Recently, his teacher has not been allowing him to participate again (we had an incident earlier in the semester which caused him to be temporarily kicked out of class), which for me is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because the best way to describe his behavior in class is like a raucous monkey, and a curse because I think his English is actually at a very high level and I would love to hear what he has to say. We have a love and hate relationship- in class I am giving him dirty looks but outside of class we always say hi and laugh together.

His class is one of if not the noisiest classes I have out of all my 26 classes, with or with out him. Although, I do think that if he was participating it would be my noisiest class. This class is so bad that the Chinese teacher has to stay in the class with me and essentially co-teach. I love her! She is definitely a hard-ass Chinese woman who rarely smiles and talks extremely loud but she goes above and beyond trying to help me control her class, especially considering that most Chinese teachers leave during my class (they do not get paid for that period). The funniest part about her is how she treats the bad kids like Frank- I've seen her hit him with books, fling his notebooks across the classroom, etc. She makes him sit in front of her during my class and if he says something she will not even look up from what she's doing and whack him on the head with a nearby notebook...hahah. I realize that this is really terrible, and I don't know what China has done to me, but I have no problem with her doing this. I think it's just that when you have a class of 50+ insane children there is not much else you can do to keep order. Plus, she doesn't do it to physically harm him, it's just enough to surprise him and maybe embarrass him a little.

So this teacher and I basically tag-team during the class- I say a few things, the kids get excited/noisy, she stands up and gives them a look, I look at her, she starts yelling at them in Chinese, she nods at me to go on and sits down, I chastise them for making their teacher have to discipline them, they be quiet for 30 seconds, they get loud again....etc. I don't mind them that much because they really do make me laugh and the noise is usually just excitement over the game but good lord I think someone must be slipping sugar pills into this classes lunch food.

At any rate, here is the infamous Frank. For a size comparison, here is a picture of him with one of his classmates. Do you see how big he is?! He's at least an inch or two taller than me. The people in Northern China are huge- I'm so short here- but this kid is like 9 or 10 years old! PS- this second picture was his idea, not mine, so I was not trying to exploit him lol, I was satisfied with just the first picture!