Drift Reality > South Korea > Korean Students 2

"Ok, ok," she said as she nodded and put her hand up as if to say, "Fine, I'll take you seriously, now sit down and shut up."

I remained standing and pointed at a seat in front of the class. Lisa responded by shaking her head and looking down at her desk. The frustration of the past five weeks welled up within me and I decided to walk forward, and pull her forward several feet, so that she was no longer seated next to her friends. Problem solved.

A strange thing happened then, Lisa moved her seat back to its original location and continued to talk with her friends. I began to get that same overwhelming feeling that I had when I walked into my first class, and I reacted in the same manner: by leaving the classroom and tracking down the first Korean teacher I could find. It happened to be Jefferson, who was seated in the teacher's room, munching on a plate of Kim-Bop.

"Yeah? What is it?" He asked, his mouth full of Kim-Bop.

"Its Lisa. I asked her to move and she won't listen to me."
"What do you want me to do?"

"Well, I was hoping you could talk to her."

With a sigh, he got up from his chair and waddled down the hall. He entered the classroom and the group of girls all giggled in unison at his appearance. I decided then that if my authority had not already been compromised by the fact that I had to get another teacher to bail be out of this difficult situation, it would be compromised by the fact that my teacher had a better relationship with these students than he had with me.

"What's the problem?" Jefferson asked with a smile, which lead me to believe that I was on the losing end of some inside joke. Lisa and him had a short conversation in Korean and I knew that the end result would be Jefferson telling me to ease up on the students as he headed back to finish off his Kim-Bop.

To my surprise, he beckoned her to move her seat. Her grin evaporated and in a matter of seconds, her face was in her hands and she was sobbing uncontrollably. I began to feel increasingly nervous. What had I done? I was only trying to get her to stop talking, I didn't expect her to act in this way. As I stood there, befuddled, she continued to cry and her friends began to console her, shooting me venomous looks every so often for good measure. Jefferson stood there, dumbfounded as well and I was pleased to observe that there were some things that crossed cultural boundaries, like the inexplicable and irrational behavior of teenagers.

Jefferson offered me a confused look before shrugging his shoulders and walking out the door. I was left standing in a classroom with four thirteen year old girls who wanted to stab me with their mechanical pencils.

I sat down at my desk and re-opened the textbook.

"Okay, let's all turn to page 82," I ventured. My request was met with a fusion of quiet sobs and conciliatory whispers. For the next few minutes, I sat there blankly and watched as Lisa continued to cry and her friends continued to console her. I would like to say that at this point, I learned the folly of my errors and never made a Korean child cry again, but that would be a lie.

I more or less spent the rest of the class making a feeble attempt to complete the lesson and couldn't have been more relieved when the bell finally rang and I could escape the scene of the crime. My last class of that day went smoothly, as if the students could sense that something serious had transpired in the previous class.

When the final bell rang, I walked outside and saw Lisa speaking with one of the supervisors in the hall outside. Alarm bells began to ring in my head as I walked into the teacher's room and saw Jefferson sitting at his desk, looking thoughtfully at his right hand.
"What happened?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," Jefferson answered in his typically verbose manner. "Lisa stabbed me with her pencil." Pausing for a few moments in order to let me appreciate the full effect of the incident, he added, "These girls are crazy."

I nodded my head in acknowledgment and prepared to make my telephone interviews before heading out for the day.

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