David

David, one of my pre-university students, is a character in the mold of the Iago character in Shakespeare's Othello: clever, manipulative, deceitful by natural disposition. I was initially puzzled early in the semester when he professed deep astonishment, with ostensibly complete sincerity, that I was 43 years old. He swore I looked 27.

Now I know I look no younger than 32.

Was it a Chinese/Western thing, where they can't figure our ages? Of course not. Other students freely laughed (to my consternation) that 27 was obvious nonsense.

David is the sole student a few others have told me they dislike -- they mention his insincerity. You may recall a singing contest in one of my classes early on (Oct. 5 missive). David was the student who got zero votes. But I'd never treated him (or any of my students) unfavorably.

David also slightly ripped me off once when helping me get some local currency. It was stupid -- his gain was trivial, and he was ripping off a teacher -- but again, it reflected a natural inclination.

Around the time of my recent meeting with Li, in which Li claimed to have no control over recalcitrant students, David got it into his head (wrongly) that something I'd said to him in class was insulting. He was also feeling combative over how I'd dealt with a couple of his friends in class on discipline issues.

David's room happens to be directly above mine. One night right after this as I was sleeping soundly, I was awoken by a sudden loud noise overhead. Simultaneously a bunch of students, maybe three to five, cheered in unison from the same location -- David's room. They then ran down to my floor, where I briefly heard noises at the end of the hallway before they dispersed.

What next? A rock through my window? Getting ambushed as I exit a classroom?

At least, I consoled myself, I'm not teaching in America.

But really, since Li had declared impotence, it was time to demand action from Meng. I had no doubt it was David. It was his room; he was angry; and he was the only one I could see roping others into a venture like this.

On an earlier occasion when I'd reported a discipline problem with someone else, Meng had impulsively declared: "We should expel him to set an example for the others." I'd responded at the time that that was too harsh (it's clear in retrospect he wouldn't have done it anyhow, it was just another of those attempts to excite my schadenfreude), but I was thinking much along those lines now.

"This is an overt attack on me, the 'foreign expert' you invited from Toronto," I told Meng in an email. The message went on to say that although Li was "the author of the complete breakdown in discipline that we are seeing at this point," it'd been "more important to you to save Mr. Li's face than to save this entire campus and all the people in it who are serious about the school's purported education mission."

But for the "complete breakdown" language, this was little more than Meng had already acknowledged to me. He realizes this campus is seriously mismanaged under Li.

The message continued:

Now things have reached a critical stage: an organized, late-night aggression against me; anarchy in my classrooms; students cracking jokes in serious discipline meetings with three teachers present. It's starting to look like the most effective lesson being taught by ICB is mob rule and delinquency.

It is time to expel some students.

Another meeting ensued. Dean Meng, Dean Yang, Jim, me. Details shortly. But meantime I had another class. And David, I could see, was looking triumphant. He'd scored a blow. He had a mocking attitude and was no longer being sycophantic.

But then I distributed my Letter to Students (see my Dec. 19 missive), and it made David furious. One of the students with deficient English whom the letter named was Richer (a girl), his frequent companion.

You might recall I was exempting those students from my charge of laziness, but that subtlety was seemingly lost on David.

I left the classroom to give the students time to read the letter and write their responses, then returned a while later. David waltzed in from outside the room after me, as the others were quietly writing at their seats. Standing before me at the front of the class, he challenged me with loud complaints about the letter.

I led him outside the room to talk. After a bit, I cut him off with: "That noise on Saturday night, David -- I am quite sure it was you."

He denied it vehemently. But he certainly seemed informed about what I was referring to.

"And," I added, ignoring him, "that could mean some trouble for you. I'm going to be talking to Dean Meng about you."

He told me I had no proof it was him.

So clever. But I was holding an ace he seemed to have forgotten about.

"If you make trouble for me," he warned, "I'm going to make trouble for you."

An explicit threat. Was this 18-year-old already in the blackmailing game?

I invited him to do his worst, and we returned to the classroom. I'd made no effort to placate him -- I didn't feel like it -- but his sense of triumph was gone, and he was quiet.