What the frick.

Why are some of my students almost indescribably adorable and others so bad that I even doubt they have souls? Seriously, there's one in first year, Ye-Min, who's such a little b***h-face trouble-maker that I'm betting (hoping) she gets into a scrag fight with some older and much more bad-ass-er Queen B who can finally teach her that sometimes you just need to sit back and shut up. Because there's no other way she's ever going to learn it, and unfortunately it's probably only going to sink in that she's not top-dog when she gets her butt severely kicked. She actually reminds me a lot of the student last year (now in third year where I don't have to deal with her thank Jeebus) who told me to f*** off to my face twice who is now apparently shacking up with her much older boyfriend and wagging school. This is a BIG thing in Korea - keep in mind that she would be about 15 now Western age, but when she started all this, she was 14. Not only is she driving her parents and her homeroom teacher up the wall, but she's probably also effectively ruining her life since there's no way she's going to get into a good high-school or university now and she's too lazy to do anything to fix it.

Haha, sound harsh much? Well, maybe. You never know, she might wake up and decide that she wants a better life than she can have working in a booking club or all day at Lotteria for w8000 a day before it's too late. But this first year Ye-Min IS a jerk, and then some, so I stand by my prediction for her. She's also a bully, and causes so many problems with and amongst her classmates that about three weeks ago ALL of the parents of the students in her homeroom class got called into school for a meeting (and simultaneous dressing down of the students) with the first grade teachers. My second grade girls have also been complaining to me about how disrespectful the first year girls are, leading to some lunch room scuffles, and I have a feeling that Ye-Min might be one of the instigators.

Last week however, she really took the cake. I walked into class 1-7 to find all the boys hanging out the window trying to get a glimpse of the police car that had shown up at the school. None of them could tell me what had happened, and my co-teacher was equally in the dark, so I asked one of the teachers the next day at lunch (the gossip mill HQ) and apparently Ye-Min had called the police and accused one of the third year boys of sexual assault because he'd touched her breast. Yes, that's right, the police. Not a teacher, not her parents, the police. And so when they rocked up to school and into the main staffroom to investigate, with none of the teachers knowing why the hell they were there, and then walking into both Ye-Min and Ju-Seung's classes to pull them out and figure out what was wrong, you can imagine the chaos that broke out.

What had actually happened was that Ju-Seung had brushed past her at the water station in the canteen (which is a tiny confined hallway area anyway and getting water is like fighting through a rugby scrum at the best of times) and she'd thrown a hissy fit about it and then gotten even more pissed off because he hadn't noticed anything was wrong and just walked away with his friends. Now Ju-Seung is one of the nicest kids around - always polite to everyone (not just to teachers), always looks out for his friends, works hard, doubly so for subjects he's not as good at - and so of course was absolutely distraught at the allegation. Ye-Min being Ye-Min (and being a 11 or so year old Korean girl having virtually nothing to touch anyway), it was pretty clear how much basis there was to this. But of course, it was still a serious matter and it still took a while to clear up. Geesh.

So that was dramatic. Fortunately, most of my students aren't in the Ye-Min category. Of course they are all teenagers and so have their ups and downs, but they are mostly pretty well behaved. I'll have to do a post about the good students later to balance this one out :)