Cambodia - 93289493 / Holyrockthrower - 0

It's official.

After 3 years of managing classrooms solely according to my own resources--through thick and thin, through debilitating illness, through political crises and institutional takeovers--I have finally been forced to resort to using "higher powers".

Generally, I tend to take the attitude that I am the highest authority, and whatever the tangled rest of the organization says or does is strangely irrelevant to me.  I do not refer students to higher powers--I simply deal with them "as is".  If they're crappy, I kick them out or enforce my own consequences.  Likewise, I habitually ignore missives handed down to me by the bureaucracy designed to tell me how to run my class.

That's my general way of handling things--I'm a dictator.

And today I finally met my match.

It built up slowly--

- students disregarding me telling them not to speak Khmer, to refer to me as "Miss Liz", and to turn phones off
- students habitually coming 30 minutes late
- students dragging class time out by chatting during assignments
- absentee rate of over 50% on most days
- locking me out on one occasion
- not doing homework or falsifying efforts
- talking when I was

And pretty much everything else you'd expect from an audience 15 years younger.  Sheesh, I haven't had conduct problems this bad since teaching spoiled kids in China, and even then, there were two teachers to handle it.

Tonight, every time I turned my back to the board to write something, I heard giggling.  Whispering.  Khmer.  I'd turn around and tell them to stop...then it would start back up.  Literally the second I turned my head back around.

After an extremely frustrating 5-minute buildup, I threatened to kick them out or leave myself.  When the class uniformly responded by giggling yet again, I realized walking out was about the only move left to me.

This, for some reason, brought forth gales of (rather derisive) laughter after my back was turned.

So, I kicked down the door and told them off (not using bad words incidentally).  Mainly to scare them into realizing what miserable little shits they were being.  Immature, I know, but not nearly as immature as the response of least one person, who informed me, "Fuck you."

And so that's why my supervisors got a phone call from me today.  The lesson from this is, yet again, Treat people like the shit they are.  They deserve it.

No way in hell is a single one of those kids passing the final exam.  No way.  What utterly useless human rubbish.