How Saturdays go.

[snarp]

11:00 - 11:50 AM - Little Miss Conan and Mr. Yodeler, both age 5. This class has been pretty bad for the past month or so. Mr. Yodeler’s been very broody for some reason, refusing to speak, play games, or color - generally just not doing anything I say. I’m not totally sure what the trigger is/was. He started out a little hyper, but largely cheerful, and he’s still like that right at the beginning of class. But around five or ten minutes in, something always seems to shut him down. I’m thinking that at some point, something happened during one of the beginning-of-class routine exercises to upset him without me noticing, and now he gets broody whenever we get to that point. So I’ve been trying to switch up the games to break the association, but it only sort of works.

I’ve been asked to make the classes really cheerful and sort of let bad behavior go without scolding the kids, and I’ve been doing so both because of this and because I, uh, am a wuss and don’t like scolding the kids. But Yodeler’s really getting out of hand, so today I decided I was going to have to go hardcore on him. Usually when he walks off and refuses to play a game, I keep at him for a while and then skip his turn and go on to Conan. Today I didn’t do that. The first time he did it I kept at him for four or five minutes, then got up and dragged him over. He got up again, and I got up and dragged him over again. (I had to do this a little with Conan, too, obviously, to keep her from wandering off while I was dealing with him.) This happened again with every new activity, but I kept getting up and dragging him over, until finally he started coming back on his own. And he was actually pretty cheerful when class ended, too!

So I have successfully imposed my will on a five-year-old. I feel hardcore.

(This maneuver doesn’t work on Mr. Weepy because his Mom undercuts it - he just runs out of the classroom to her whenever things don’t go his way, and she makes no attempt to punish him for this. He pretends I’m murdering him when I try to pick him up or pull him, of course. If I could get that ridiculous woman out of the damn building, Mr. Weepy’s class would probably be fine. (It’s really bugging me because one of the other kids in there, Mr. Clown, is really, really bright, and I can’t spend enough time with him because I’ve got to keep Mr. Weepy from hurting himself.))

12:00 - 12:50 - Mee, age 10. Mee is always good, unless Conan is in the room with her, in which cases she is bad. We started a new chapter today, so she hasn’t quite gotten a chance to build up a proper Mee-style battery of insults with the new vocab yet, but she’s figured out how to say, “I’m embarrassed by Conan.”

Mee is the only kid with the patience to sit there and read a whole passage she doesn’t understand all of, and then go over the hard parts - the others her age absolutely refuse to keep going when they run into a word they don’t know, which means I have to keep stopping to explain stuff, and they never get the sense of the passage as a whole.

1:00 - 1:50 - Lunch break. I had ramen, and then went to the grocery and bought small donuts. They turned out to have anko in them, which combination grosses me out.

2:00 - 2:50 - Zuzu (8), Cookie (7), and Princess (6). Zuzu is kind of moody recently, and Princess, who’s always chronically behind the others, missed class last week, which set her even further back. Nonetheless, these guys are still one of my favorite groups. They’re very cheerful and easygoing, they get along really well despite the age differences, and they pay attention. When they don’t understand something they sit and think about it for a second.

This week I invented a brilliant game in which the kids roll a dice and have to balance the resulting number of blocks on their heads. I came up with it for Zip and Zoh’s class, but it was clearly made for these guys - they were giving each other advice on the best ways to balance the blocks and everything. It was adorable.

3:00 - 3:50 - No class. (There used to be a serial skipper in this slot, but she’s now quit entirely. I never actually met her.)

4:00 - 4:50 - Mr. Sleepyhead, age 9. Mr. Sleepyhead was very sleepy (as is common with him) and kept yawning, which obviously made me yawn, too. After realizing this, he began yawning deliberately. I whapped him with the flashcards.

We’re working on the difference between “I want” and “I like” right now. This is difficult for Mr. Sleepyhead because he is in a Rebellious Phase, which requires that he claim to dislike everything. At one point I pointed out his mother to him. She was sitting out in the waiting area, and could hear him perfectly well. “Do you like Mama?”

He considered this. “So-so.”

“She’s going to expose you on a hillside.”

Mr. Sleepyhead’s Rebellious Phase does not make him hostile, like it does with a couple of the other kids - he’s always cheerful and well-behaved, he just has certain things his principles forbid him to say. Also, this week he’s been randomly talking in a spooky whisper. I have been calling him Sadako.

(Mr. Sleepyhead is the owner’s kid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them talk to each other.)

5:00 - 5:50 - Jerkface (10), Ken’ichi (8), Bonze (8). I kind of suspect Jerkface of having ADD - he talks literally constantly, and though he tends to memorize the vocab and structures quicker than the younger kids, he’s never focused on activities for more than a few minutes at a time. Of course, he could just be a jerk. The stuff that comes out of his mouth bears this theory out. Today he called me scary, Ken’ichi stupid, and the games boring.

He likes wrestling with the other two, particularly Bonze. Today he apparently conceived the desire to pick Bonze up and hold him in his lap. While I sympathize absolutely with this desire - for Bonze is tiny and stoical and adorable - it was somewhat distracting to Bonze, who has a strong sense of his own eight-year-old dignity. So I had to yell at Jerkface. He was not at all repentant.

Ken’ichi was a huge slacker as always, but he’d done his homework for once.

6:00 - 7:00 - No class. This used to be the Broodmaster’s slot. They said they had someone to fill it, but said person apparently changed her mind.

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

Comments

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

Aw, your kids sounds adorable and colorful!

I hate working on Saturdays.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

"Colorful" is a great euphemism. ;)

[snarp]

Some of them are euphemistically colorful, some of them are complimentarily colorful, and some of them are apparently dressed by colorblind parents. Mr. Clown on Wednesdays has the most horrible outfits I've ever seen.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Hahaha!

Well, I guess it was apt, then!

[snarp]

Most of them are adorable! But others are only adorable sometimes, upon the fulfillment of special conditions, like when it rains on the night of a new moon and a mother snake eats her young. So, those particular kids are not usually adorable.

Saturdays are especially bad because work starts two hours earlier than usual, which my internal clock can't get used to.

[elongated-tito.livejournal.com]

It's been awhile since I've been in an American elementary school, but I can't help but think that the picking up and whapping with flashcards wouldn't go over so well. It sort of a ripple effect of a country's overall (reported and prosecuted) crime against children rate, I suppose.

Also, re: being a wuss: when I worked at the high school of eternal chaos, quite a few kids figured out that if they really really really didn't feel like going to whatever class and could come up with a semi-logical reason why not, then I was the person to come to. Two minutes of whining, maximum, and I would give in ("Alright, goddamnit. Go get your stuff, don't let anyone with actual authority see you") and let them spend the classtime hanging out in our office. Given the myriad of ways I avoided class in high school I'd have felt like a hypocrite otherwise, and teenagers can sense weakness.

[snarp]

I whap them very lightly; it's fine! Though I don't play stuffed-animal-catch with the kids when the owner is around, because one of his random executive decisions was that catch is dangerous. Apparently you can put somebody's eye out with a beanie baby.

I'm okay with letting the kids act up in class sometimes, but if I let them do it all the time it would get really tiring. My attempts to train them to behave are thus entirely self-interested.