Against all odds, I am a teacher

I never liked kids.

I still face a daily struggle to resist the urge to stick my foot out when a kid is running towards me at full speed.

Kids to me have always been like a puppy with ring-worm: irresistibly cute until you pet them and they give you a parasite that climbs up your arm and leaves you with a hideous rash.

Somehow, after passing an intensive police background check, I am now an English teacher in Thailand. Teaching 3^rd to 9^th graders who have been trying to learn basic English phrases like, “How are you?” for the past six years.

Everyday the question runs through my head, “What the fuck did I get myself into?” I am no teacher and the little teaching training I have had in NO WAY prepared me for this.

Some days teaching gives me the biggest rush. I feel like a million bucks, like I am on top of the world. It is such an ego boost to have an entire class applaud you for writing down the simplest word in Thai.  But when a class goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Filling me with a need to rush home to a dark corner and a stiff drink.

When I walk to a class, kids rush up to me and fight over who gets to carry my books, insisting on walking me to class hand-in-hand. After class, they shove each other out of the way just to shake my hand.

During class is an entirely different story. They run around screaming, rushing the board to play tic-tack-toe while I am trying to teach. The older kids sit in groups and make fun of my awkward; I have no idea what the fuck I am doing, dance moves.

Fellow teachers have granted me permission to hit my students. Many students have told me to hit their classmates when they are acting out. One of my 5^th grade students brought me a beating stick they pulled out of the bamboo garden growing in their front yard.

Gift from my 5th grader.

The past week or so, I have had an internal struggle on whether or not it was appropriate to hit students. I have always believed that if a parent is paying a shit ton of money to send their kid to a private school, they are actually paying another adult to discipline their child, therefore it is the responsibility of the teacher to occasionally set an example and whack a kid.

I have been asking my American colleagues their opinion on the matter and every one of them makes me feel like I am a horrible person for even thinking that it is okay to hit a child. My co-worker almost brought me to tears, making me feel so guilty after flicking a kid in the head after he gave me the finger while screaming “FUCK YOU.”

I thought I would get some perspective on the matter and ask a woman who actually sent her child to a Catholic school, which would whack their students’ knuckles with a ruler, my grandma. After telling her the story about the kid who flashed me the bird she told me it was acceptable to hit the kids, suggesting, to hit the kids on the leg where it would sting the most.

I am still facing an internal struggle on whether hitting kids is appropriate for a teacher. I guess I will just have to play it by ear and see how much the kid aggravates me. What I do know is that somehow I have to establish my dominance and I am so grateful to the 5^th grade kid who brought me the stick that strikes fear into my students.