July 22nd- Kids are Crazy

I would be faux if I said I was not at all worn down from my incessant teaching and yelling at children. My students are the definition of petulance. For some odd reason i did not think that breakfast was a necessity for teaching this morning, or that I needed sustenance at all. Seven am comes early when you are sharing a bed with another man. Being torn from a most pleasant dream about home, I was crudely awoken with a urgent knocking at the door. It was the we are leaving in ten minutes warning. I darted out of bed and into the shower, sprayed myself with a tepid stream of water, and scurried to the bus. Upon walking outside, I saw no bus in sight. Either my peripheral vision had gone temporarily askew, or there was no bus. As it turns out the bus had gotten sucked into a puddle of mud about a half mile down the mountain rode. So I clipped on my Dakine pack tightly, and grabbed a child’s hand and began the bounding descent. We strutted through backyards, where peoples lives were on display like an open heart surgery, exposing the inner organs of their backyard lives. When I glimpsed the bus, I knew we were in for trouble. Mud licked the wimpy wheels, and swallowed a row of tires. These buses tires are the antithesis of teeth, if any fierceness was in this bus, it vanished long ago. After a ten minutes struggle, we wrenched the bus loose from the iron grips of the earth, and de –rooted it from the mouth of the ground. Murky water squirted out of the gaping holes like blood after a root canal. Soon we had the bus completely turned around, and we were on our way down the mountain once again. Our direction was Iksan once again, another day of teaching lay ahead.

Once we arrived in Iksan, we headed right to the teachers room to begin planning for our lessons. My kids are diabolical- exaggeration is not to be employed- they literally are little Korean monsters. I have decided to not let their cuteness fog my judgment on them. An aberration at this juncture would most likely mean the collapse of my mental faculties, so in short, I have become frank with them, discipline will be the normality in my classroom. Any conscientiousness I did possess has slowly begun to slip away. However, I am not the juggernaut of discipline, but merely a disciple of order. Once a student steps out of line- with a minimal medium of excepted degeneracy, then I take the petulant child to my co-teacher Eric Billstone, whereupon, his punishment is implemented.

Like every normal Korean classroom, polarization occurs almost immediately, and verbal insults are slung from every which way, and then if luck has it, fists are jolted across the room, and the smacking of skin almost becomes incessant. Representing my state ordained position as teacher, I have the distinct opportunity to serve the state with the adjudicatory prowess, and that being, and not limited to- the immediate installment of discipline. Tears flowed like an unquenchable spring, sobs broke the lessons fluctuations, but order remained. And if asked, I would sacrifice the life of a child in order to instill discipline- all in the holy name of the state, of course. Indeed, this seems a bit rash, and a bit totalitarian, but sacrifice is inevitable in the states good name, and life is but a sacrament of the ritualistic order of control. I say this in jest of course. Discipline is just the subsequent reminder, that as a teacher, one has to keep order for the students to learn.