I showed up at school a little early today to see what the reaction would be. Students were gathered together, meaning that some meeting was going to happen.
I stood with Laurenco and another professor as Laurenco (my pedagogical director) explained what was going on. He spoke in very vague and delicate terms about the boy who died yesterday.
He was in my 2nd oldest turma, the first class I had to teach today. He died trying to subdue the boy who's currently in jail.
Laurenco went on to talk about the funeral and memorial service. We will have a service Saturday morning at 8 AM.
After he finished, a group of we teachers talked for a little but about his family and the incident in more specific terms. After about 20 minutes of the first class were gone, I walked into my first class, the turma that lost a member.
I didn't know for sure at the time that it was this turma - but it was quite obvious these students weren't acting like the rest. Though they see death every day - in some form or another - they were very definitely affected. I didn't know how to address the situation with them, but communication isn't all about words.
As usual, they stood to greet my, saying good afternoon. I responded likewise and, as usual, asked how they were doing. The automatic response is "We are doing well", but today there was an awkward silence and then mutterings of "We are doing badly" or "We are doing normally". Then they asked how I was (which isn't the status quo) and I started to give them a thumbs-up but changed it into a horizontally-waving hand meaning "so-so".
I could feel my eyes start to well up, but knew I couldn't afford to start crying in front of the class - for too many reasons.
I took a couple deep breaths, spoke very poor Portuguese to absolutely no laughter or comment, and started a very brief lesson. A few times during the lesson, my concentration slipped and I could feel the lump in my throat. I tried my best to keep things light, but realized I was just biding time.
I hope other professors took the time to talk about what happened - I think I'm going to try and talk with a couple kids from the class before lessons start tomorrow afternoon.
In college, I remember dealing with a few deaths - and how organized and open everything was.
Here? Well, it doesn't quite feel real because I'm not seeing all the typical signs of grief or trauma. Most of the kids seem completely unaffected and are joking about the whole thing.
So does that mean they are really in denial? From an American perspective, without a doubt. But from their culture, it almost seems like their method of grieving, to simply accept it as a part of their lives, especially when they aren't close to the victim.
And it's been confirmed that the boy was killed while trying to help out.
The killer apparently had walked into this professor's class earlier in the day, and not being a student at this school, the professor told him to leave - and violence might have been used at this point to make him leave. His actions were, as the rumor goes, in response to this violence.
I've had a couple light disciplinary incidents which would never fly in the States, but I thought I would share.
In one of my turmas, there is this abnormally short kid who's always giving me crap in one form or another. After one comment, I figured I'd really cut him down to size (pun intended), so I told him to come to the front of the room and feigning like I was going to do something else, I turned around with mock surprise and told the boy standing in front of me to "stand up".
The room literally erupted in laughter and it was all I could do to not join them. The kid walked back to his seat, almost completely unfazed. He continued being a pest the rest of the lesson, but toned down.
This may sound extraordinarily mean and silly, but to some extent it worked. I don't like myself very much for doing it, but I've got to raise the bar.
Today there was a boy and girl talking in the front of the room, across an aisle. They had already been causing trouble, so I basically had it in my mind that I was kicking them out, but I wanted to have some fun with them first. So I told the girl that she could sit with her "boyfriend". Then I got more specific and told her she had to sit on his lap. As I expected, she was reluctant to do so, so I told them they had the choice of leaving the classroom or doing it. Well, she sat on his lap to a fair amount of laughter. They were having a good time, too, pretty amazed that "teacher" was doing this. I then posed one stipulation that if they laughed, I'd tell them to leave. So I faked a couple times like I was going to start writing, then turned around, laughing hysterically at them for about two seconds to which they responded by, of course, laughing. So in the next breath, I told them to leave, completely straight-faced. The class laughed, but then shut up very nicely after about 10 seconds. The rest of the lesson went very smoothly, though I could still hear laughter from outside where the couple was telling their story.
Now THAT I'm proud of. Any time I can introduce fun discipline that does the trick ( the students returned for the next lesson and were very quiet throughout). I'm a happy camper. Especially when the kids need a good laugh.
Peace
John
