Chapter 32: "The Departure of Vacant Girl"

When I first started teaching waaaaay back in February, I had a class with a bunch of little girls and one little boy. This was just a regular reading class, no huge deal, and the kids were cute, maybe seven years old or so. But one of the girls drove me crazy because she was so completely vacant. I spoke as slowly and simply as I could, I asked the other girls to translate to her in case she didn't understand, I gave her more attention than anyone else, but there was just nobody home. Thus I named her (in my head) Vacant Girl. I may have mentioned her before. She would just sit and space out while we were doing an exercise. Even if I said her name and pointed to the page and said "do" she wouldn't move an inch until I physically put a pencil in her hand.

The only thing she'd get into, that I recall, in that class were the drawing exercises. For a seven year old, she had mad art skillz. I always let my kids draw in class when they're killing time between exercises, unless a teacher tells me not to. But I digress.

Vacant Girl moved to a new class with the schedule change, and for some reason, although she was still vacant, it wasn't a lack-of-intelligence type of vacant. She was just spaced out, and I can appreciate that, since I'm not even home half the time either. She showed she could actually keep up in class and understand things, and as the term went on, she really improved, until she was nearly at the top of the class with her test scores. And there are some clever little buggers in that class, let me tell you. I announced when she scored the best, because I wanted her and the rest of the class to see that the two smartest kids wouldn't have the top scores every week. And I wanted her to be proud of herself, maybe speak up a bit more in class.

However, a few weeks ago she stopped coming to class. Since this is just a private English school, not the school the kids go to every day, you never know why the kids don't come. I figured regular school got in the way, or there was some other schedule change for her, so it wasn't a huge deal. But the other day I asked the Korean head teacher where she was, and the teacher said she didn't want to come back because the other kids made fun of her and didn't like her.

I hadn't noticed it during class, but thinking back on it, I guess I can see how it happened. I don't think the kids picked on her for being smart (like I said, the wheel was spinning, but the hamster had, uh, stepped out), and I don't think they were mean to her because she was dumb. I think she was possibly just an easy target. A classmate called her fat once, which I was having absolutely none of. She was usually the brunt of the who-farted game, which only went on as long as I let them be distracted. So I don't feel guilty for not stopping anything really. But I am a bit sad that she bailed, since I was really getting impressed with her work. But I can say from personal and second-hand experience that being smart is a poor substitute for being liked.