Ever had a student who just gave you headaches? Ever had an adult/young adult student who consistently contested what you taught in class?
How did you deal with them? How about little kids?
Post your stories here…
I’ll post my friend’s story about how he shot one difficult student in the arse with a BB gun later.
One time we were playing pass the ball to anyone in the class to answer your question. (a big mistake) and the small mafia which had slowly grown into 3 sub mafias in my complicated class, got the ball. They then used the dogeball, super slammer throw to kill one of the other mafia groups in answering the question - which then sparked the total chaos, complete cry break-out, “got-you-back”, and “ignore teacher” process, which slowly brought me to search higher educated methods of understanding how to teach English.
TaidongRudeboy, how did you get on with the ‘unless’ freak?
I have no idea.
Whatever the question, I have no idea.
Female, mid-20’s, no opinion about anything. No life experiences. I am a student. I live in Taipei. I have black hair. I have no hobbies or interests. I have no idea.
Why are you in an English conversation class?
To improve my English.
Why?
Because it’s not good enough.
Why does it need to be better?
Er,
Eventually I told her to go away and not cmoe back until she had something to talk about. Can’t have a conversation if your brain is empty.
I have a student for which the word precocious doesn’t even seem to fit. I’ve know her since she was three years old but I didn’t actually have her in class until last year when she skipped a grade in English. She’s a very sweet child, but a loner and a reader. We’d have cooking after reading some stories where the kids would make brownies or apple crisp. She refused to eat it because she didn’t want to get too fat. We did a unit on friends and did several writing projects about friends. She declared she didn’t have any friends. I said, “Well, who do you play with?” She replied, “I don’t play.” Holy shit. This was a six-year-old too.
Fast forward to this year.
I am teaching her again. This year she tested three grade levels higher in English abilities than her chronological age, but her family wants her to only be one year ahead. She has talked about Steve Irwin’s death in detail and has told me that if she gets into an accident, she wanted to be euthanized because she didn’t want to live as a cripple for the rest of her life because it would be too depressing. Our last class this week, we were reading the nursery rhyme about “Monday’s child is fair in face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace…” to practice her handwriting. When she read the last line about Sunday’s child being bonnie, blithe, and gay, she asked me if everyone who was gay was born on Sundays. I told her, “Gay can mean happy.” And she replied, “Oh. I thought ‘gay’ meant you liked to have sex with people of the same gender. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
On the plus side, I have made her more empathetic to the plight of animals when she brought up cropping dog’s ears and tails being okay because they were only puppies when it happened. I asked her if it would be okay if someone cut the fingertips off a baby since they wouldn’t remember it when they were older. With a normal student, I would have never thought to bring up such an argument, but with her, it was okay because she has the logic and maturity to see what I meant. Which she did. And when I put it that way, she saw that just because they were puppies didn’t make it right.
I suppose she’s not difficult in any way except in keeping up with her intelligence.
I have had far more difficult students… like my first year in Taiwan when I had the three-year-old who threw up everyday while crying for her mommy because of the threats her mother made when she dropped her off every morning - along the lines of “If I hear that you were bad at school, I won’t pick you up.” Upon hearing that her daughter didn’t cry one day, she proudly announced that it was because she gave her a beating in the morning and said she’d give her another one if she cried at school. Once I had pinpointed where her problem laid, the girl became easier to deal with.
[quote=“ImaniOU”]This was a six-year-old too.
Fast forward to this year.[/quote]
Just curious…how old is this girl now? Six + “fast forward” = ?
[quote=“ImaniOU”]I
I suppose she’s not difficult in any way except in keeping up with her intelligence.
[/quote]
exactly, this sounds like it is more or less in category of “problems you’d like to have”
Not me. I like 2nd graders to be 2nd graders. Not 7-year-olds going on 40.
I said fast forward because the friend thing was over a year ago.
The most difficult students I have had have been the ones who were autistic or ADDS. Of course the school never tells you this until you’re ready to pull your hair out and personally I know I’m not qualified to deal with these kinds of students in these kinds of situations.
are we talking only kids here? i had a violent adult student once. cursed me and tried to hit me. he was banned for a awhile.
I have an ADHD kid right now, but I asked his mother for a meeting after my first three days with him to talk about ways to help him focus better. I gave him a balloon filled with raw rice so he can keep his hands busy while he’s in class.
When I was in high school, I used to babysit an autistic girl with ADD and was one of the few people outside of her family who she would show affection to.
I think my patience with those kids actually goes beyond my normal limit compared to ones who have been conditioned to be difficult. I rarely feel frustrated by an ADHD kid, but ODD kids try the very edge of my patience sometimes and spoiled kids get very little patience from me at first.
[quote]I have an ADHD kid right now, but I asked his mother for a meeting after my first three days with him to talk about ways to help him focus better. I gave him a balloon filled with raw rice so he can keep his hands busy while he’s in class.
[/quote]
The kid I had last year would have chewed up the balloon in two minutes flat, and spent the remaining 43 minutes throwing the grains of rice at the other kids in his class…
I’m not in Taiwan yet but I can tell you about the most difficult students I’ve worked with back here in Canada and it’s not pretty. Doesn’t help that my assignments have all been what are called BRC’s–Behavioural Resource Classrooms. I’ve been called every name under the sun and moon, I’ve had chairs, books and classroom objects thrown at me and I’ve had to deal with the diplomacy of mending fences with teachers and admin. The nice side of it is I get to meet some really neat children who are not the desk throwers or name callers just a bit mis-placed in the school system. I could care less about those Oppositional or Conduct kids. I just ignore them and they get mad and eventually just give up. That planned ignoring thing works like a charm. But those ADHD/Autistic Spectrum/OCD kids make things interesting.
When I was in China I had all well behaved kids in the classroom for the most part. Kind and respectful teens. Save for one particular class. I was trying to teach them the 12 days of Christmas but they were having none of it. The rest of my classes loved learning the song but this one class was just plain awful. There was no motivation to learn, and I’m a pretty infectious person to be around–you have to be to have my current job-- Either way I got so frustrated with them that I just walked out of the classroom to the staff room to tell their Chinese teacher. The next day I went into to teach they were all eyes and ears and ‘eager’ to learn.
Surprisingly, the most difficult kids I’ve had here have been the second to uppermost level of evening 3rd - 6th grade bushiban. They think that they know all that, have done all that, and thus, don’t have to try all that much. As a result, they make significantly less progress than they have done before or they backslide. No amount of bullying, offering incentives or disincentives, Chinese teacher assistance, or telling parents has done a darn thing for long. For one day, you might change them, but the next day they’re right back to the same. It makes me want to send them all back a level, but of course, I’m a teacher and I can’t do that - not to mention that doing so would result in huge complaints from parents. Yaaaaaaaargh!
Hahaha wait until you come back to the States. You’ll have to deal with 13-year-olds and sexual maturity. 
[quote=“Namahottie”]ImaniOU wrote:
Not me. I like 2nd graders to be 2nd graders. Not 7-year-olds going on 40.
Hahaha wait until you come back to the States. You’ll have to deal with 13-year-olds and sexual maturity. Twisted[/quote]
Hahaha actually 13 is now on the older end to be dealing with that - I remember hearing a whispered hallway confession in the late '90’s in middle school from a 11 year old sixth grader who thought she was pregnant, and another one who didn’t want her room to smell like … so she was in the process of refusing her boyfriend something. [/quote]