아이고....

I had a student freak out in one of my classes today. I'm kind of bummed out about that.

"A" is 12 years old, and in one of my higher level afternoon classes. He's generally a good kid, and in fact got the highest score on the most recent test, but has a real problem doing his homework regularly.

What brought it on was a new policy I started up in the class at the beginning of December as a way of dealing with the boys who weren't doing their homework. In my elementary school, your grade would go down if you didn't do homework, but since homework at JEL isn't graded (and is more "subjective" anyway), I thought I'd solicit the students input on what to do.

We decided that if a student didn't complete their homework four times during the four week session, he would have to sing the ABC song in front of another class. Yesterday, in fact, one student had to do that. It's embarrassing, but since students from other classes have had to do it in front of our class, it wasn't an unprecedented cruelty.

"A" thought he didn't get the worksheet from yesterday, but it was in his bag the whole time, disguised somewhat from having been folded in to a triangle shape. He knew he'd already missed three assignments (in just the first two weeks), and I warned him about having to sing yesterday, so it should not have been any surprise....

But he was pretty upset. He started crying when one of the other boys showed his amusement, then ran over to the corner of the room, and went to ground. After a few minutes of this, I sent the rest of the class (four others) outside, and asked from some help from one of the Korean teachers. When she couldn't get him to budge and he started screaming, we tried involving some others, until at last we had to ask another the biggest foreign teacher to physically restrain him and then carry/drag him out of the room (I was definitely not comfortable with this part). "A" punched him twice and bit him; were it not for his sweater it's likely "A" would have broken the skin.

Not pleasant.

So we called A's mom and he went home. I had the rest of the class (which hadn't seen anything, but heard most), come back into the room; they were just as shocked as I was about the whole thing, but we finished the rest of the class without incident.

We'll see tomorrow how things go. Man, the next class is going to be awkward....