I have renamed my high schoolers (yes, that is now a word) HellBeasts. In all seriousness, that class feels like hell. In the past month it has been a source of unneeded stress in my life that I’ve been struggling to overcome. The class I teach them is a joke; they know it and I know it. Three times a week I go up to their classroom and try and teach them something to prepare them for their upcoming test they will not pass. In response, I get yelled at, ignored, snored at and things thrown at me. There was one fun incident with a box cutter but I don’t think the boy was really trying to stab me… And when I say yelled at, I mean some of these boys can throw a tantrum better than any of the nursery students at the kindergarten: in your face, screaming and spitting with grand hand gestures in Thai type of tantrum. Oh joy. I almost have to psych myself up for those fifty minutes, knowing I’m bringing a tiny pocketknife to a gunfight. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I don’t feel comfortable touching the students after they accused me of kicking them and I can’t yell at them because, hey, I’m suppose to be the sophisticated adult here. Plus they scream a lot louder than I do. I could call it a terribly degrading experience I have three times a week. They are mean, disrespectful and, in a way, powerful. Teachers have fled this class crying, some have refused to go back after one week and one smaller teacher actually fainted in the class from yelling so much. They know if they wanted to all they have to do is complain to Mommy and Daddy who then complain to the school and it’s “bye-bye, Teecha,” which has happened before. Frankly, I don’t have the correct attitude or temperament for the class. 
Yet, sadly, life is not black and white and you could make a case to stick up for these kids or, at least pity them. One thing that is very obvious is that some of the kids don’t know how to think. Truly, really don’t know how to think. When I tried to ask them questions about their plans after graduation I got silence (blissful silence!) When asking what plans they had for their upcoming break I got shrugged shoulders. Even asking if there was an activity that they might want to try instead of trying to accomplish something in this class was met with crickets. None of them have anything to say about what they wanted. They don’t know how to ‘want’ because they haven’t really wanted much in their lives. These kids are groomed, wired in and made mobile in the latest fashions. ‘Want’ isn’t a concept they have known. Consequently, they’ve never had to think, ergo, no thinking skills. Simple reasoning skills like process of elimination are foreign to them. 
And it’s easy to forget, especially when I’m watching a student crumble my worksheet and throw it across the room while throwing a tantrum, that they are teenagers complete with all the peer pressure, insecurity and heightened emotion. Combined with their lack of self-control and maturity that grows with responsibility it can be a dangerous combination. I am constantly reminding myself that they are regular teenagers and the drama unfolding in the head of a teenager always seems like life or death. And worse, I can't really get to know the students because of the language barrier. While their English is better than my Thai, so much is lost in translation that we might as well not be talking at all. Frustrating, to say the least.
My last class before their midterm test I took one from the kindergarten handbook and brought in two sheets of paper. I asked them to paint me their nick names then their names in the Thai alphabet. I put on some music and sat painting with my little HellBeasts. Granted, only half the class showed up that day but it was the first time I wasn’t yelled at. As the kindergarten has taught me, all kids enjoy making a mess with paint and they are just kids after all…kids with Blackberrys, BMWs, horns and tails, that is.
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