Whoever Says Girls Aren't Inherently Evil Is Nuts

Today I went to my favorite school and expected a peaceful week. It most likely will be a pretty good week but I found out something that will probably make at least tomorrow more interesting.

At this school, I teach mostly girls. I would say that 3/4 of my students here are female. This is one of the reasons I expect peace and quiet when I come here, girls and I get along tons better than the boys and I. The girls are also more willing and wanting to learn English than their externally equipped counterparts. The dark side to teaching girls is that they are about 362 times more devious and conniving than boys. The boys I teach are like dogs, you pay attention to them and give them a reward on occasion and they will behave for the most part. Girls' thoughts tend to run deeper and this creates new and fun challenges for me as a teacher.

Today I learned that I have two sisters that are basically running an extortion ring while in English class. It isn't really extortion, it is actually more like they are charging late fees on a particular item. Japanese girls are very streamlined when it comes to being girly and learning about other girls. Instead of passing a series of notes and carrying on heart to heart conversations while doing each others' nails, Japanese girls carry with them papers called "profiles".

Profiles are professionally printed sheets of notebook paper that contain sections like: My favorite color or My favorite food or My favorite movies, My blood type is, etc. When girls meet each other and decide that they might actually like each other, they exchange profile sheets. It is then up to the girl to take the sheet home and fill in all of the blanks so that when they meet up again, the to would-be friends can share all of their important information with each other and the completed sheets are then filed away in a binder that each girl has that is built for such profile sheets. It is essentially, a rolodex/Facebook for the age 9-13 crowd.

Anywho, these two sisters are giving out their profiles to other girls in the class only on the condition that the profiles will be filled out and returned by a specific time and if the person fails to return the aforementioned profile, they have to pay these two sisters money. Evidently, last week the Japanese teacher caught one girl paying them and forbade the transaction and told the parents. Now the sisters won't talk to her and one other girl has been absent from class for two weeks because we think she hasn't returned her profile and doesn't want to pay. If she comes to my class tomorrow, I have to make sure no money changes hands.

Part of me says, "Hmm...I wonder how big my cut could be if I keep quiet and let the sisters run their operation?" The other part of me says that I need to lay off the Sopranos. Whoever said organized crime was on the way out has not met some of my students. I love kids.


UPDATE: I just got back from the class and the two victims of this sibling run extortion ring didn't come to class today. Hmm.