Classroom Stress - Robert Vogt

I’m twenty minutes from finishing class when my supervisor Gerald and his wife Cheryl show up. It really wasn’t the surprise they had planned on as I have been anticipating this visit all week. While talking to them last weekend in Taipei, I could tell from their level of concern with my performance as a teacher, that I would be graced by the presence of one of them soon without warning. This is all part of a nightmarish situation involving requirements for the American school that I represent. This whole episode is kind of like a bad flu that just keeps coming back when you think you’ve got it beat. Quarterly reports that I’ve done wrong, student work samples that the children have done wrong, the complete absence of lesson plans on my part, and the fact that I’ve never even heard of gross or fine motor skills make me wonder if it will ever dawn on these folks that I am not a teacher. The job I held before this one was as a plumber.

I’m not saying their drop-in doesn’t bother me, it certainly does. I immediately ignore the obvious concern at hand of class control and start worrying about the daily lesson checklist that I did improperly and how much I don’t want them to see it in it’s un-doctored form. I try unsuccessfully to shake these fears as the class project of writing big letters and coloring them with a picture for the bulletin board is getting a bit stale. I then decide to get the kids singing.

They actually want to do a rhyme so we do, “Ten little monkeys jumping on the bed.”All the way down to one little monkey who falls and bumps his head. Next we do, “Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,” and I’m inside of the song not thinking about paperwork anymore. “And on that farm he had a…Pig-ah,” some students yell, “Pig!” I respond, correcting the mispronunciation. “With an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there…” and so on. We end things up with a rousing rendition of, “Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes…” After singing we finish the class and I set the students free.

I straighten up the disheveled teacher’s desk, close the classroom, walk past a small group of adults discussing, in Chinese, most obviously the problems with my class. I inform Gerald that I have to immediately go to my apartment and deal with paper work.

Back at my apartment at an appropriate and inevitable stopping point in the paperwork, I head over to Mr. Yang’s, Gerald’s Taiwanese partner in this American school project. I’m looking for a copy of the Jumbo Alphabet Book which I’ve forgotten to bring home with me. I get ambushed into dinner and then set down with Gerald to hear what he and his wife have to say. I’ve been dreading this ever since I walked away from the grave looks at school after class but doing paperwork, just like singing earlier, settled me down.

“You need to line ten children up and have them fall one at a time at each verse and bump their head, and have someone be a doctor and have someone be a nurse,” Gerald starts. My supervisor is an expert at recommending ideas that promote pandemonium in the classroom. I can envision the insanity that could ensue from this exercise and decide immediately that only the shyest, timid, and well behaved students (mostly girls) will be chosen for this.

“You need to make a sign with cows,” Gerald continues, “oink, oink, moo, moo. Give the cards to different students and have them say ‘Moo, moo’, or ‘Oink, oink…’ You need to have the kids stand up and jump up and down when they aren’t paying attention, have them stretch, yawn, wave their arms around.” I decide to take notes as the avalanche of information heaps upon me.

“London Bridge is falling down…,” my supervisor’s wife starts singing, “falling down, falling down…”

“Patch it up with chewing gum, chewing gum, chewing gum,” Gerald chimes in.

“Nail it up with iron bars,” Cheryl again, “My fair lady oh.”

Together we do, “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”, a little of, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.” And my boss sings “Kookaburra” for me.

“Itsy bitsy spider,” “Jack and Jill,” and “Hey, Diddle, Diddle,” are suggested. And I bring up the idea of introducing, “It’s a Small World After All,” because I hear it at the school all the time in Chinese.

And in the area of discipline, “You need to grab that boy that is trouble and shake him!” Gerald models the action for me.

“Shake him? No don’t shake him,” Cheryl replies.

“When I was a student, if the teacher grabbed me and shook me I would be…,” and Gerald takes us back forty years to a Singapore classroom where a student’s experience was probably more painful than I would really want to reproduce at the present time.

The information keeps coming and I keep writing.

“Stop everything, no talking…! Are you ready?”

“Gross motor-whole body, fine motor-writing.”

“You need to really show your anger! Look that student in the eye and say very sternly I want you to be quiet!”

“You have to look very serious with your eyes, show them that you are upset.”

It stops rather abruptly surprisingly enough around nine o’clock. I walk home and I really want to give Gerald a call in a couple of days and say, “Ya know, this really isn’t my cup o’ tea…” and so on but I know that without this job it would be back to manual labor for me which I have grown quite tired of.

On Monday, Cheryl comes to Yilan City, where my school is located. She’s going to help me work out some problems with my classroom management and also start a new class that I will teach, made up mostly of eight and nine year olds. I’m at school preparing for class when she calls me on my cell phone informing me that the furniture in my classroom needs to be rearranged. The stress starts to well up inside of me immediately and I can already tell that this is not going to be a fun day.

She arrives at the classroom a short time later, begins to move the desks around and requests that I set up a mat which pieces together in one-foot by one-foot squares. I had tried using this thing before and decided that it was merely a forum for misbehavior. Lollygagging, fights breaking out, and constant physical squabbles were what these pieces of foam rubber matting produced along with cries of, “Teach-ah! he touch-ah me!” But I unwillingly pull the squares out of the cabinet which has been their home for some time and sadly start to piece them together.

I’m writing some words on the chalkboard while Cheryl stands about two feet behind me, “You go down when you make your ‘j’s? You are supposed to go up,” she criticizes.

“Handwriting was my worst subject in school,” I laugh.

She and watches me write every word and catches me when I write an ‘f’ in a downward rather than an upward motion.

Cheryl seems a bit irked and I fear it is all because of my inadequacies as a teacher. I am irked myself at her coming into the classroom and changing it completely around.

The new class meets first and Cheryl decides that we will start things off by having the children sing, “Welcome, welcome how do you do? Welcome, Welcome how do you? Happy to meet you happy to see you. Welcome, welcome how do you do?” Yes it is a stupid song and it was probably written for toddlers not second graders but like the day when Cheryl and Gerald intruded on me unexpectedly, singing helps me ‘shed my skin’—it takes the edge off. I just get into singing this dumb song well, and I am able to forget about my frustrations to a certain degree. Things go rather smoothly, Cheryl leads out for a good part of the class, and of course the kids are good with this being the first day of class. I lead out in some sections of the class and am torn between the sweetness of the children and my dissatisfaction with my situation. There are two sisters whose English is much better than anyone in my older class, one of which looks like the character Chip from the sixties T.V. show My Three Sons. Her name is Sally. Her sister has just one of her front teeth missing, her name is Fanny, Fanny Fu or as she likes to say it, “Fanny Foo Foo.”

In between classes Cheryl brings up the fact that I have asked for a raise for the new class. “Gerald told the other teachers and David they would be working four hours a day,” she informs me.

“Gerald told me I would be working three hours a day,” I answer.

“No, I don’t think so; I think he told David four hours a day.”

I think my blood pressure raises a little as I say, with a smidgen of tension in my voice, “It doesn’t matter if he told David four hours, he told me three hours.”

I walk out of the classroom shaking my head just enough to be visible. I stand in the open-air fourth floor hallway against a rail and try to relax just a little.

The second class meets at 4:30, but the majority of the students are actually in assembly at this time and come wandering in over a ten-minute period. They are allowed to eat a snack at this time because they don’t have time to eat dinner.

“The children can’t eat in class,” Cheryl commands.

“They have to, they don’t have time to eat dinner,” I answer impetuously.

“Well, they can eat for ten minutes and then they have to stop,” she answers. “They filter in from assembly; some of them don’t get here until 4:40,” I answer with attitude still in my voice.

The kids are walking in, setting down, and eating, some with sweets.

“They aren’t allowed to eat candy,” Cheryl tells me.

“No candy for dinner!” I yell out with just a little boisterous rebellious anger.

We split the class in two with one group on the mat and another group in the desks. Confusion abounds and I’m feeling like throwing in the towel and blaming everything on Cheryl’s changes.

I focus on the kids on the mat getting them to ask me questions. This is a fun activity that allows the students to practice their English by asking me whatever is on their minds.

“Ahh…, Teach-ah,” a student named Edie starts up laughing and stuttering along. “Do you, ahhh-ahhh…, teach-ah, do you, ahhh-ahhh…, ha-ha! Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes I do,” I answer with a smile.

The split class thing is not only asking for trouble because of the distance between me and the students setting in desks, but change in the classroom seems to encourage chaos so not a lot of progress is made on this day.

By Wednesday I’ve had enough of the whole situation and am ready to open the door to my resignation or termination at the drop of a hat. I’ve been the target of criticism all week, “You really should... The students shouldn’t be allowed to… You have to… You should…”

The shoulds, shouldn’ts, cannots, are not alloweds, and nevers have been piling up and I have decided that there will be only one more and I am waiting for it because I have a great answer for it which goes like this: “You know, I really think it is time for us all to take a look at whether or not I am the right person for this job,” etcetera.

On Wednesday I don’t get my chance to vent my frustrations, so I am raring to go with my rant on Thursday. Things are going pretty bad and I know there will be some criticism today because I am pretty much ignoring the whole class control thing. I try a little but I don’t really care, making it hard to get into that “mean acting” groove and I am just waiting for and looking forward to the after class criticism.

At first recess I notice Rachel and Tammy trying to push their way into the room next door. I walk over to look into the situation. There are about six wooden desk chairs braced against the classroom door from the inside. I press all of my weight on the door and reaching around just barely get my hand on one of the chairs pulling it out of the way and opening the door. Tammy and Rachel follow me in.

“Rocky, Michael Lin, and Jackie!” Tammy whispers pointing to the balcony and closet area at the far end of the darkened classroom. I don’t see anybody in the silent space but it is hard to ignore a zealous tattletale at times. I walk towards where the fingers point trying to ferret out the perpetrators. I get about halfway into the room and the three troublemakers come running out of the closet making a circuitous route to the outer edge of the classroom avoiding my clutches and I start to run after them.

“I WANT YOU TO…!” I roar. The rage echoes in my ears and out of the classroom throughout the entire school as I am stopped dead in my pursuit with my right thigh making hard contact with one of the little wooden desks. The collision causes a chain reaction involving four other desks strewing books about the floor.

Anyone who happened to be on campus at that moment most definitely heard my vehemence and thirty children sit, meek as lambs, looking at me with just a little awe or maybe fear in their eyes as I conduct class during the next hour.

I don’t get any criticism after the class, probably due to the meekness in the wake of my rage. This fortunately doesn’t provide me the chance to perform my well-memorized speech.