The Best Laid Plans

I taught a Drama English class recently. I’m supposed to teach at least 10, maybe 20 of these classes, and I have to inform you that the class was worse than plague.

The purpose of the class was a noble one: students would be taught English without really realizing that they were being taught English. They'd play, act things out, listen to instructions while being shown those instructions by me, they'd become characters, and they'd ultimately, hopefully, act out a short play based on a fairytale and their "interpretation" of a fairytale. Pretty tall hopes for a group of six year olds.

But anyway, here's the gist. Teachers know that one kid can derail a group to an insane degree – group mind takes over and then things just completely devolve into chaos once one kid starts the ball rolling.

I had that one kid, and his name is protected because I am trying to be a decent human being.

First of all, this is a small class. I only have six students, one of whom did not show up. Four little boys and one little girl, all roughly age 6. You can imagine, if you were ever a child, that there’s a stigma on little girls that is held by little boys and sometimes the girls are gross and boys want to stay away. Well, in an after-school program with only one girl, when they’ve been cooped up in classrooms all day, this can get magnified, and this little a-hole kid jumped on that from the get-go.

It’s a bit difficult to discipline kids when you speak two different languages, even if they can see that you’re angry. It’s a bit more difficult when the amount of discipline that particular kid needs is to be put in a closet and locked away from humanity for five to seven years.

I was hoping to get them to work on some emotion-based things. While they knew roughly zero English, I was pretty sure they knew what happy, sad, angry, scared, sleepy, and a few others were, or I could at least hope to easily demonstrate. It worked for a minute.

And then the worst thing that can happen to a class happened.

A wasp flew into the room. And there were 14 foot high ceilings so I couldn’t even scare it out a window.

While I understand the panic from kids, this was next-level. I did my best to assure them that it wouldn’t be a problem, that they were not in trouble or in danger, and they if they kept being awful, I was going to have a brain hemorrhage.

The one kid – the awful one – took it upon himself to scream out that he’d seen the wasp every 15-30 seconds for the remaining 30 minutes of class. This meant that virtually nothing was going to get done and I would spend my time lifting them out from under the desk or carrying them to an area to sit down or otherwise trying not to run away screaming because they were the worst things ever.

In the end, it was probably not the worst experience of my life, but it was not good. I really don’t know how to get a kid to shut up when I don’t speak the same language as him – even though his classmates would occasionally decide that they’d had enough and relax and try to stop the madness. It didn’t work. They’d eventually get sucked back in.

Herd mentality is never as strong as it is in kids who don’t understand you.