At the bilingual school where I am teaching in Honduras, I teach mainly middle class Hondurans, which is an extremely relative term. I also teach three orphans from a Catholic orphanage nearby, where children live either because they have no parents or because there parents are too poor to support them.
One of them is a boy named Allan who at the beginning of the year was by far my worst behaved student. He never sat in his seat and crawled around grabbing other students feet, and almost seemed to enjoy getting in trouble for the attention he got out of it. I punish students by making them stay after class for 5 or 10 minutes, and when he got off without punishment he would often stick around the class annoying the punished kids until he ended up being punished himself.
For whatever reason, he has started being better in class and I have been trying hard to get him to believe that he can get attention for improving his behavior rather than acting out. I have no idea what happened but there are now days where he will sit in the front row quietly and pay more attention than anyone else. But he still has days when he reverts to his old self.
The other day in PE class he threw a rock at one of his classmates. Rock throwing is one of those things that is viewed very differently in the developed and developing worlds, here it is very common for students to fight with rocks, and throwing rocks at dogs or cows is the accepted way to get them out of your path.
Our class had just had a rock fight that sent a kid to the hospital however, and it was common knowledge that throwing anything, let alone rocks, would get a child suspended.
I called Allan over.
“What are you doing?? YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T THROW ROCKS. DO YOU WANT ME TO SEND YOU TO THE DIRECTOR? You want to be suspended?”
“But I didn’t hit him.”
“That’s not important you could have hit him. We talk about this every day its so clear that you can’t throw rocks. I don’t want you to get punished but come on man, we talk about it every day.”
He sat and thought about it for a minute. Then glared at me.
“Look at you. Always with the same shirt. It's so dirty.”
“Allan that's ridiculous. I wear different shirts. You have a uniform you have to wear every day. So YOU always wear the same shirt!”
“Yea but its always clean. I never come with a shirt that dirty.”
“That’s because you have nuns who clean your shirt for you every day.”
“You’re so dirty. Why do we have to come to school and listen to some dirty guy tell us what not to do?”
“In the U.S we have machines that clean our clothes. I am very bad at cleaning my shirt by hand. I’m trying. I also sweat a lot because its so much hotter here. I have to bike to school and then I am sweaty from this all day. I will try to clean my shirt a little better though. OK?”
He nods. “Its ok. Just try a little harder. No girl will like you if you walk around looking like that”
He starts to run off to join the football game again.
“Wait. Stop!”
He slows.
“This wasn’t about punishing me for my dirty shirt. Its about you throwing rocks at people and me punishing you, and even with a dirty shirt I can punish you. Get back over here.”
He smiles at how close he was to getting away with it. I am terrible at this.
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