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The kids aren't alright.

It's been Halloween month here at Kids Herald School and our hideous days are consumed with off-key singing and cries of "Teacher, teacher! Dollar please!" Let me explain. The kindergartners have been in intensive performance mode for the last week as we desperately try to hone their childlike abilities into something we can show their parents come Monday. I never really had strong feelings about the Adams' Family, but now I'm sure I will go into convulsions if I ever happen across a rerun on TV and the theme song assails my ears. And the choreography - oh, the choreography. Lines of children swaying back and forth, banging into each other. Triangles and cymbals clanging and clashing at inopportune times.

Screaming and yelling. "You think this is fun? Do you think Halloween is a joke? Your parents will be watching you on Halloween... do you want your parents to see you putting your fingers in Sally's ear?? You're going to make mommy and daddy cry!" The kids will undoubtably grow up with a hatred of All Holidays Western. This is definitely not the Halloween I remember.

The older children have been getting bribed with "dollars" - tiny replicas of American money - all month. On Halloween day they can exchange these dollars for candy and treats and, I dunno, maybe pony rides or something. Every day they covetously produce their collection of dollars, often lined up neatly in their own special little pocketbook, and proceed to inform me just how many dollars they have. Then the other students will either produce their fat stash of dollars in an effort to one-up the original kid, or cry to me: "Teacher, teacher! I only have ONE dollar!" And expect me to rectify the injustice. Of course, I only laugh at how poor they are.

We're supposed to give out this Halloween money for good behaviour, but I usually use it to bribe kids to do something that amuses me. Writing the best sentence about how amazing I am, for example, and then I give the dollar to the kid who draws a picture of me looking like a pig. I'm fickle like that. Anyways, I've been out of dollars for a while now and I think the children are starting to suspect my weakness.

A few weeks ago we took the kindergarteners to this place called the English Village. The English Village is ostensibly supposed to show the kids how to act and behave at such Western staples as: The Post Office, The Police Station and The Host Family Dining Room. The whole thing was a big load of shit though, as the resident teachers at each of these locales inevitably set the kids to drawing pictures. Drawing pictures is the ultimate time waster, and I gave these false prophets meaningful looks as if to say, "Bitch, I can use this tired trick for free back at Herald!" Also there are police stations and post offices and dining rooms in many, if not most, Korean locales, so I don't know what the hell this field trip was supposed to be about.

However, a big fat Texan man who ran the show gave them a harsh dose of Western reality from time to time. He would amble down a hallway, spot our kids and make a beeline to them, presumably not noticing their looks of terror. "Whaay hallo there lit-tle bay-bees!" he would roar. "Yer not mo-war than a mouthful, ain'tcha?" And they would shrink away and he would laugh, a big belly guffaw that shook them to their very bones. And then he would move on, leaving them to wonder when the scary man who didn't speak English properly would return to devour them for real. I came to look forward to his visits.

Finally, the Tale of the Tiny Thief. A few nights ago we were over at Belinda's place, gossiping about the kids as per usual. Sometimes it bothers me when you spend your entire day at work and then have to talk about work in the scant few hours you have before doing it all again, but occasionally it's worthwhile. This was one of those times. We were discussing one little girl who I would label as "entirely nondescript" and Sam bluntly called "a fucking alien."

Well, apparently I was misjudging Alien Lucy: she is definitely a Child of Note. After kindergarten, she roams the hallways during the afternoon classes until her mom comes to pick her up. I teach her sister, Alice, and weirdo Lucy often spends a fair portion of the class peering timidly through the door. Once I invited her in to sit down but she only wanted to sit beside Alice and that made the table dynamic lopsided and unpleasing to my eye, so I never asked her in again. I'm all about aesthetics when it comes to seating plans.

Anyways, Mike and Sam told us about her sordid past - on no less than three occasions in the past, she's been nabbed for stealing from the teachers' lounge. They'll do random bag searches on her, despite her wild head shaking (I've never heard her actually talk), and pull huge tins of candy and hundreds of stickers out of her backpack. She doesn't steal in moderation - she's a full-on kleptomaniac. And she's good at it. The teachers had to lay multiple traps after they found their possessions trickling away and Lucy sidestepped them all, creeping through the cracks with her ill-gotten gains clutched tightly in tiny hands.

Anyways, one sad day Lucy slipped up. She got careless and Sue found her with a bag lined with half-eaten cookies from Cindy's desk. She couldn't really call Lucy's parents because that would be a catastrophic, immense embarassment to her family under the Korean concept of honour. They would have no other choice but to pull Lucy out of Herald, taking their fat enrollment fees away from our coffers. Unacceptable! So the little thief was lectured, and lectured hard, and she 100% knows that Stealing is Wrong.

Ever since, Lucy has been subject to intense scrutiny. When she prowls through the lounge, she's watched like a hawk. She is no longer nondescript. Still, her disease lingers on. And when I heard the story, I thought about how my bag of dollar-store candy from home had been dwindling away. I thought about my missing sticker sheets. I thought of Lucy. The next day Mike bag-searched her and, sure enough, one of my candy bracelets, half eaten, sat guiltily at the bottom of the front pocket.

And she sat there, on the edge of the desk, with a ring of teachers around her and a sad little smile on her face.

She's broken and all my candy is gone, but this is what makes teaching so great: assembling a story out of their incubating lives and turning the kids from a sea of blank faces into actual characters, one by one by one.

Posted by Chris at 12:28 AM >> Commentations (6)