because I do not humiliate my students for no reason!!
At school on Friday, I was hanging out in the English teachers office and a bunch of my 3rd grade students came in to see their Chinese English teacher. They were from one of my most ridiculously out-of-control but lovable classes so I was very happy to see them. Usually, they are bouncing off the walls with excitement when I walk in the room. More so than my other classes, these kids really think I am like the big sister or the baby sitter or something. They hug me, they give me back massages, they want me to play hand clapping games with them (remember 'double double this this'....I made the mistake of teaching them that lol). Once class starts, they are still crazy but they get pretty into my games and activities so I accept them for who they are, lol.
So when they came into the office they made eye contact with me and then sighed and looked down with out smiling! I was very surprised. They lined up in front of their teacher and waited. I didn't think too much of it at first, students are often coming in and out of the teachers' office at my schools to recite some inane English dialogue or even sing a song to them (one day, tons of students were singing "I will follow him" to their teacher!).
However, the teachers at this school (Tao Yuan) are particularly aggressive and after making the students wait for a bit while she was (pretending to be) busy grading something, the teacher started screaming at the first boy in line. I have no idea why she was doing this, but I don't think it had anything to do with his behavior because some of my good kids were in line too. My guess was that he did poorly on an assignment or something because I have seen the teachers yell at their kids for this and fling their notebooks/assignments across the room.
So, the boy started bawling and she continued to humiliate him while he stood there. He started crying so hard to it started to sound like he was having a panic attack. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to stand up and take the boy away from her so he could calm down. Of course I couldn't do anything but it was so ridiculous. I kept turning around and sort of giving her dirty looks but who knows if she caught my drift. Eventually she stopped, he left and came back a few minutes later... but he was still having trouble breathing. She made another girl cry too who I think is a sweet little girl.
Don't think that all Chinese teachers do this though because at the main school where I teach at I have never seen an English teacher do this to a child and I can't imagine any of them doing so. I think maybe there is a just a different culture at Tao Yuan. The English teachers there feel like they have a lot of power over these little kids or something and they often abuse it. Pretty sad.
I even feel like they try to play power games with me a little bit there because at lunch I am not allowed to serve myself my own food, even though most of the other teachers help themselves to as much as they want. A student usually brings me a tray with a decent amount of food on it but I literally eat every bit of it and I'm usually still hungry afterwards. On the other hand, I see the English teachers load their trays up with a ton of food and throw half of it away.
At first I thought maybe they had the kids bring me the food as a sign of respect, but this hypothesis fell under suspicion after my friend Bell had a terrible lunch experience there. She told me that one day they only gave her like 1 or 2 sticks of chuar (grilled BBQ meat) as her main dish and she was still very hungry so she asked one of the teachers if she could go get more from the cafeteria or whatever. The teacher told her that she could not, even though a little while later that same teacher walked in with like 10 sticks of chuar. Wow...pretty insulting. After that, Bell refused to eat there, I don't blame her! The thing for me is just that the lunch is free, it's convenient, and it's not too shabby. Although, if something like that happened to me I would probably stop eating there....out of my 3 schools the teachers there are by far the least friendly to me.
Just wish I could tell the kids that this behavior is not acceptable and to not model themselves after that when they become adults....
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