One of my new classes is a Tuesday special "activity" class for our lowest-level, youngest class, a combined "Basic" cohort. These kids are essentially "pre-Phonics" and I'm mostly focused on getting them comfortable with a classroom conducted in English and doing fun games and vocabulary review for the online materials we're using.
There is one girl, a 2nd-grader, who has a quite distinctive personality. Her English name is Hailey. She has a preternaturally deep voice for a child of any gender, and sometimes hearing her talk can be disorienting, as she can sound almost like an adult if you pay attention to the tone of voice and not the content of her words. This dissonance is augmented by her tiny stature.
Either because of this, or for whatever other reason, she is also fairly behaviorially mature for her age, and a little bit bossy with her peers, but strangely staid and polite with adults. She actually likes to sit and pay attention quietly in class. When we were playing a game, yesterday, she was copying down words from our last exercise, practicing her English Alphabet letters. She suddenly raised her hand and asked to go to the bathroom (in Korean). After making her repeat the request in English, I let her go.
After she came back, she resumed her writing, and I let her – I run a fairly loose classroom anyway, and far be it from me to force a child to participate in a game when she'd rather practice writing.
Then suddenly my coworker Helen popped her head in the classroom and said the class was too noisy. I assumed this was because there were some prospective customer-parents in the lobby, and having a loud, raucous classroom is not a great sales pitch – at least not in Korea. So we ended the game and went on to a more structured and quieter activity.
Later, Helen told me that in fact, Hailey had stopped by the front desk on her way to the bathroom, and had complained to her about how noisy the class was, and had requested Helen to come tell the class to quiet down.
I found this truly funny. I have never had a 2nd grader complain about a too-loud class, before. I didn't even think it was possible.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]