I finally had a tenuous grip on my Friday afternoon class. Okay, to be completely honest, I’d given up on telling the slackers to stop talking, and was making the whole class copy questions off the board and answer them in their own words. Then another teacher comes in – the Head, or Deputy Head, or someone else with an inflated sense of self importance. No sooner had she opened the door than she starts tearing strips off a kid at the back of the room.

He’s an Ecuadorean kid, who loves quality musical artists like 50 Cent so much that he dresses like them. Rap is his life, he tells me. Whatever, I say, but it’s really not the best source of English learning material. He was the one who was pushed into my first class, feet dragging and shoulders slumping, after being picked up wandering the hallways. Now this teacher is going off at him because he was wearing his sweatshirt hood on his head.

This guy is the best student in the class. Granted, it’s the worst class in the school. But he pays attention. He makes an effort to understand what I say and to respond in English. He helps out the other students. If all my students were like this, well, I’d be stoked.

And all this teacher can do is heap shit on him. “In Spain, we study at school”, she says. (Does she think that in Ecuador all they do is sit around with their hoods on their heads in class?) Perhaps she should have been glaring at the Spanish slackers when she said this, the ones who’d barely noticed me up the front of the class because they were too busy gossiping amongst themselves and writing notes to their friends.

Finally she finishes her rant, returns a book to another kid in the class as initially intended (no, it turns out that she hadn’t been on Ecuadorean hoodie patrol, after all), and excuses herself, leaving me flabbergasted and the whole class on a downer.

It really annoys me that this kid, who is intelligent and onto it, gets so much abuse from the teachers. (His reaction to the outburst showed that he was quite used to such tirades). It would have been more than sufficient for the teacher to tell him to put his hood down and to let me know that it’s against school regulation to wear it up. A five minute rant was not necessary. In fact, the five minute rant helps the poor guy understand that he’s useless, and stupid and that he’ll never amount to anything.

This is part of a wider issue I have with discipline at school which I intend to deliberate on in the coming days. Sure, I’m new and haven’t been dealing with bratty kids for half of my life. Nor am I really familiar with the deeper social undercurrents at play here. But, it just doesn’t seem to me to be the way to treat students.

Other posts by Katie Llanos-Small