Shame

In a country where “keeping face,” aka, maintaining your status, and not looking bad in front of your peers is crucial, I guess it makes sense that ’shaming’ a student would work as a behavior control technique. However, the process of shaming a student that you cannot really rough up (as tempting as it is sometimes), much less communicate with effectively using words, becomes much more complicated. The Chinese teachers have the edge here. There is no hesitation in berating a first grader for a few minutes in the middle of class to stop the unwanted behavior. Top offenses include:

1) Incessant touching of desk mate. Some kids just cannot keep their hands off of each other. Sure, it’s cute, it’s puppy love, but it’s clear they are not paying attention to my melodic rendition of 3 Little Monkeys, and its pissing me off.

2) Stealing the “Hello Kitty” pencil pouch of the girl behind you, or the “Toy Story 2″ rocket ship pencil box of the boy in front. It never gets old, trust me.

3) When repeating as a class, there is always the one kid who has to say it first, throwing off the whole synch of things. I realize that when the most stressful part of your day is having to glare really menacingly at the kid who says ‘B’ right when you say it, instead of immediately after like everyone else, really your job/life isn’t all that tough. But I can’t even begin to explain how I want to rip their vocal cords out.

Today, I figured it out though. The kids here go absolutely insane for a sticker (preferably a red, for communism, star) as a reward. I’m pretty sure I could get them fluent in French too, if I had enough stickers. So when I first started giving them out I was a little bit confused, because instead of holding out their hands for them, they look straight up at you like a lost puppy might. I learned eventually that this was the cue to put them right on the middle of their forehead. The more stickers they get in a day, the cooler they are. Status clearly isn’t lost on them.

So today after my little star student got his sticker, I suppose he realized that odds were he wouldn’t get another one, and he could just goof off the rest of the day. I went over to his desk, tapped him on the shoulder, and made sure everyone saw me rip the sticker right off his head.

Making children cry isn’t always my goal. I just consider it a perk of the job.