More crying!

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Today I had both Crying Four-Year-Old and the Indomitable Mr. K again. Crying Four-Year-Old cried again, this time before his mom had even put him down on the floor. She came in and sat with him on her lap, and she played my four-year-old-intended games with me for half the class while he watched big-eyed, until he finally felt okay doing it himself. He kept looking back to make sure she hadn’t left, though.

Lady, you seem really nice and everything, but if you always pick the kid up and start petting him when he starts crying, it’s no wonder he does it so much.

Mr. K was hilarious. Literally every kid I had today was coughing, most of them being very Japanese about it, hunching their shoulders and looking slightly embarrassed and pretending it hadn’t happened. Mr. K staggered in pretending to be dying of tuberculosis. For a second I thought he was really sick, because he was doing a really good glazed expression, but his mom said, “No, no, he’s just a con artist.” He then started giggling, but continued to lurch around as he took off his coat and sat down at the table. Whenever he did badly in a game, he “died,” once banging his head against the wall pretty hard. He got up giggling, so I’m assuming he didn’t concuss himself.

Mr. K always gets incredibly happy when he gets a word right on his first try. Unfortunately, he almost never does that. His class is only half an hour long, not fifty minutes like most classes, so he doesn’t have as much time to soak stuff up. He’s a year behind all the other seven-year-olds. I’m trying to decide if I should be giving him extra homework.

I was actually briefly confused about Mr. K’s gender. He’s got a very androgynous haircut, and most of his clothes could go either way. It doesn’t help that there’s a girl in one of the other classes who literally looks exactly like him, except a head taller. (Her name has “hime” in it, or I’d have wondered about her - I had the vague idea Mr. K’s name was a masculine one, but I haven’t heard it much, so I wasn’t sure. “Princess,” however, is not ambiguous.) He’s marked as a boy on my schedule, but so was the unrelentingly-pinkly-garbed Little Miss Conan. So I wasn’t completely sure until I heard Manager calling him “K-kun.”