Exhaustion

Today has been eventful and exhausting. Not physically exhausting, but mentally. It’s also not because of my birthday, but because of troubled kids at school.

Any time when I am running a class that has to do with content that my foreign friends help created, I will record the class session as a way to return favor for these friend’s priceless efforts. Yesterday, I had a quiz session when students can get prizes for the right answers. It was chaotic and everyone was excited, but only today when I was editing the videos from yesterday’s session did I realize something unfortunate happened during the class. I call it bully. Others may want to be conservative and not call it bully because the term “bullying” now carries legal liabilities.

To start, the first kid is the famously annoying 3rd grade kid in my videos. Let’s call him Liao. He’s loud and sometimes obnoxious, but that’s because he has trouble handling his expression of emotions. However he’s a kind hearted kid. Everyone knows this, and every kid treats him as a friend, putting up with his yelling.

The second kid, Yang, 5th grader, has a rebellious tendency. He recently got into trouble for several vandalism cases which caused damage to the school, and his grandpa had to come to the principal’s office today to discuss his behavior and the damage cost.

Liao is an orphan and is cared by his relatives. They seem to love him like their own and I've never heard of family trouble from his end. Yang’s father is in prison for manslaughter, not clear about the details. His mom lives in the city far away to make a living and hardly visits him. Yang lives with his grandparents who also have to work to meet the day’s end.

Actually, this is a norm here where families aren’t together because of livelihood challenges.

What happened was, Yang, for no good reason, provoked Liao accusing him of not paying attention in my class when the truth was the opposite. In any case, Yang continued to intimidate Liao, hit him, punched him, pinched his ears hard, held his head against the table, tried to stab him with a pencil, threw stuff at him….. Liao then reacted like he always do, yell back, which attracted other higher graders’ attention. As they came to see what’s happening, they immediately put the blame on Liao because he’s always seen as the trouble maker, while Yang laughed away.

All this time, Liao stayed in his seat. He did defend himself physically once, and yelled back at those who wrongly accused him. Perhaps he’s already used to this, but one characteristic that I like about Liao is, even after being scolded, he can just turn around and start joking with you. He doesn’t really keep unpleasant feelings in for long. So as soon as Yang went back to his seat, Liao was back to focus on what’s going on in the class, raising his hand to answer questions and was just engaged as any other kid. There’s no way I could have forgotten what he just endured if I were him.

When I saw this video, I was shocked and more importantly, angry. I could not believe what Yang did, and mostly, could not believe what I saw in him from his bursting rage that came from nowhere. He picked on Liao because Liao was an easy target, and one who can easily become a scapegoat as Liao did in this case. If it wasn’t for the video, this incident would have gone unnoticed.

So I informed the school director just in time before the school ended. Yang, Liao and another witness were asked to stay back after school to clear things up.

And the summary to this part is, Yang mentioned all the stuff that was to his advantage, and claimed that he “forgot” what happened that led him to attack Liao. So we showed him the video and asked him what he thought of it. He did not say a single word.

I really don’t know what is really wrong with Yang. Obviously he has a lot of frustration, stress and negative emotions accumulating in him. The way his rage burst at Liao was really like a caged beast trying to release his detained energy. It was not something one will find in an elementary school kid. Perhaps it’s his frustration of unable to be with his mom as he once expressed his wish to be with her. Perhaps it’s his school life not going so well as he’s not allowed to join the baseball team he so desired since he doesn’t even do his homework. He’s simply not getting what he wants his way, and probably feels trapped emotionally. Nonetheless, there’s no reason to justify his actions of physical abuse and lying.

I don’t really know how this will be settled as this is clearly not over yet. However this isn’t all of today. As I left school and went for a run, I found out that one of my students isn’t home yet. It’s been 4 hours since the school ended. So on the way back, I was also looking for him. So this is a 4th grader and let’s call him Hao.

Hao is a kind kid as well, but not too sharp. He will never do harm to any one, but he often does weird things that gets himself hurt, like riding his bike straight in to a wall, or tie his shoe laces together(foot to foot) to see what happens, or go swimming in the sea during typhoon weather. I guess he just want to see what happens without thinking about what may REALLY happen.

At 4th grade, I taught him how to read time. He never learnt how, which really bazaars me. And that was when I realized why he’s such a laid back kid. He has absolutely no senses of time, and therefore urgency! He would wander around and play along the way home on the 3km route, not knowing what time it is and therefore not knowing how late it’s getting. He’s really just enjoying the moment.

Today, I finally found him and some other students playing at the fishing port, a place they shouldn’t be for obvious reasons. And today is the second time in recent weeks when he made his grandma seek high and low for him. He was just punished by his teacher two weeks ago for this same reason. He has already forgotten about it.

And this is where the exhaustion came from. It’s not physical since I still had energy to run my daily 7k. It’s the mental stress worrying about these kids. Even though I am just a passer by, someone who’s only here for a year and leaving in two weeks, I care about them because I know that what we don’t do for them will affect their entire life. A life time is such a terrible thing to waste, and I want to do whatever I can to help them make theirs good. There’s only so much one can do if you have no influence on their families. Sometimes, the selfish me wish I can take them in and do it myself.