"More One"

This morning I realized I miss hearing "Sensei, more one! More one!" and other brilliant utterances that my students come up with. "More one" means "one more time", by the way. I guess they translate directly from Japanese, which has a reverse word order for this phrase. Yeah, it's only been a week, but I miss my kids. Funny. I thought I was really glad not to have to see them for three weeks. I don't really miss the kids below 5 years old, but I miss the older ones a lot, even the crazy rowdy ones. I have this one 9 year old student that can be a pretty maliscious trouble-maker. He'd draw on my materials, throw stuff, bend stuff, and I am very surprised he hasn't broken anything in my classroom yet, because he got pretty close a few times. And yet, I like teaching him, because you should see his face when he is concentrating on trying to read something or get a question right. I think he actually likes English a lot, but acts out because the rest of the class does too. Looking at him always reminds me how right I was to adapt the principle of not judging people by first impressions. If I were to teach him 5 years ago, I would hate him so much, and he would hate me so much, because his actions really are threatening untill you find a way to handle him.

I have a few more kids like him, and I always got frustrated with them at first, but I found common grounds with most of them. I have just one kid who is very troubled and uncooperative, and I really don't know how to deal with him because it's not only his personality, I think there is a slight mental problem there as well, but even he is a very good-natured and extremely smart kid. He just has really bad days and even cried once in my class, even though he is 11. I sometimes feel a little at a loss of what to do with him, especially because his class is very small (only 3 students), and he really disturbs the other two kids (who are really smart and enjoy studying English), but I think with time I will get to figure out how to make the situation better even with that kid.

Anyways, I guess I was really busy until today, but today I had a bit more free time, so I started missing the kids.