Politeness and the Full Service International School

Yesterday at the Pretty Good International School here in Fast-vakia, teachers met parents. One colleague was positively itching to get one student's mother aside and inform her of the rude behavior of her daughter. After their conference, the teacher said to me something like, "It wasn't just a case of cultural misunderstanding...." And he went on to imitate the child's behavior (eyes rolling toward the heavens)....

But by my lights, this particular colleague carries politeness to an obsequious extreme. Morevoer, I worry that one can get personally committed to the Just Avenger Routine.
What really hangs on it? Can a child really harm me or my ego? Those are the sorts of questions I've asked myself at various times..... Footnote: See the article by Ekman and others about the Buddhists on emotion. There are emotions which simply are never good to have.....
http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/publications/ 2005/Ekmanet.al_CurrDirPsychSci.pdf-
Further afterthought: and are not those emotions which some find themselves holding precisely in virtue of what they wrongly imagine to be morality?......

Alas, these are deep waters, and here at the Pretty Good International School, we are very busy. Deep sea diving equipment is just too expensive. Our inboxes are overflowing with good intentions and demands to meet, forms to fill out, and students to educate and moralize. So, as a teacher, I sympathize with other teachers who find the demands overwhelming. We are not only supposed to teach but also to entertain our young charges with sports and cultural activities. Additionally, we are (according to some) at all times appearing on stage in the guise of role models. Hence, we must never, for example, use taboo words....

Unfortunately, I have not got the facility for determining a student's intentions that some of my colleagues seem to possess. I've heard such expressions of certainty as, "That student was being impolite. I know it..." (And somewhere in the background I want to add the unspoken words: don't give me any of that crap about cross-cultural misunderstanding...)

I am, however, deeply sceptical. Sin, classically conceived, requires quite determinate intentions: the evil-doer must know what they are doing.

And that requires the person passing judgment to be in a position to say: I know what he/she knows.....

Which, is a matter of what's in the head, what they are really thinking, or what they've done with the input they've received, or a matter of how attention is focused, and a matter of how one's particular personal history has primed one's attentiveness, etc.

All of which complications are too much for the busy teacher bees at the Pretty Good International School.

Some will complain that these complications are merely the invention of frustrated philosophers or psychologists. Alas, they correspond to things in the real world. And so long as we ignore these elements of reality and tar them with the brush "unncessary complication" we shall be behaving ignorantly, and willfully so.

I think of a conversation I recently had with the local version of the Iron Lady. Why, the IL pondered, don't the Korean students smile and say "Hello" or "Good Morning" back to her in the early morning when she greets them?

I asked one of my students about this. She said that she does smile and greet the IL. And the other students? Probably they think the IL is crazy, or they are simply embarrassed and confused. A school director in Korea wouldn't engage in this behavior....

Are we teaching something substantial? Or are we merely spreading Anglo-Saxon or North American ways of behaving?

Footnote: Which linguist was it who once said something like this: There's an ethical problem about monolingual English speakers going around the world allegedly educating multilingual students.....?

Indeed, there is an ethical problem here.