A first grade boy came to our hagwon today holding a small potted plant. After running around pretending scissors were a gun and pretended to shoot everyone, he slammed his potted plant on a table and cracked it. He then took the dirt in his hand and proceeded to rub it in a second grade girl’s face while another boy held her down and hit her. None of the teachers saw this, as it was not class time, but both boys admitted she was telling the truth as she sobbed uncontrollably and my director and I tried to figure out why dirt was all over the floor of my classroom.
My co director came in with a broom to sweep up the dirt and when I commented on his outrageous this whole situation was she said “it’s just what boys do!”
And all I could think of was “so you’re going to show up to court after they are arrested for assault in ten years and tell the judge that they should be forgiven because they are boys?”
And I KNOW that is a crazy thought to jump to, but if no one explains how horrible their actions are to them now, when will they learn?
The look on your director’s face when you’re telling her you refuse to teach a class if they don’t start getting disciplined for following you home and asking inappropriate questions about your sex life and you remember her nephew is in that class.
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WIWD
In addition to me wearing my outdoor sandals inside today because I’m sick of the students being allowed to wear them on days I’m not here (even if I hide them under my desk!) I’ve started trolling on my director’s “attention” posts.
“When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar,” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. “My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.”
It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book “The Women’s History of the World” (recently republished as “Who Cooked the Last Supper?”) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.”
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Sandi Toksvig, ‘Top 10 unsung heroines’ (via ninestories)
(via melancholia-macabre)
(via peaceshannon)
My ten year old student is bragging about how his parents let him drink wine from a box when they traveled to America last month.
I can’t decide if it’s disgusting or amazing.
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