bad

I teach for two hours a day at Super English, an after-school academy. My students are three to six years old, but many of them have a higher level of English than the second-graders I teach in the morning. In my first class, I have the smartest of all of my students, a tiny five-year-old girl named Gun who is every bit as girly and headstrong as I was when I was a kid. She loves showing off her absurdly floofy dresses and raises her hand to answer every question. She's fantastic.

That class is now all girls, but I used to have a few boys, the most memorable of whom is Bamboo, a chubby five-year-old who is good at English but terrible at behaving himself. He's a fat little cannonball, just runs through life destroying everything in his path. Gun has no tolerance for his nonsense; she's always rolling her eyes at him, or shaking her head at me and saying, "Teacher, Bamboo is bad."

There's one central rule in my class: no speaking Thai. If they're not speaking Thai, they're not distracted, and generally listen and behave better. I'm strict on this rule.

So one day the kids are doing a worksheet. I turn my back for a moment and hear a smack. I spin around and Bamboo is hovered over Gun's desk, her Cinderella pencil case is in his porky fist, and her arm is raised. She quickly returns it to her lap and looks guiltily at me.

Bamboo launches into a wailing narrative in Thai, acting out what happened, clearly trying to tell me that Gun retaliated physically against his theivery.

Gun looks at him, looks at me, and waits. When Bamboo stops, waiting for me to punish his assailant, Gun purses her lips and looks me directly in the eye and says, "Teacher, Bamboo is speaking Thai."

No punishments were dealt that day.