Kids are weird here

Maybe it's just me, but I don't remember so many kids crying, falling into comas and throwing up when I was at school. I'm fairly certain that a technicolour yawn was such a rare event in fact that when it did happen it was enough to stop the class completely for as long as it took for the teacher to locate the kitty litter and wipe the offending child off. Here if someone throws up the teacher doesn't even bat an eyelid, nor do the other kids, they just tell the offender to get some tissues and clean it up before their socks get wet. As for crying, usually it was limited to the result of leaving five girls to "work together" for longer than 10 minutes, or leaving boys to "play" for a similar period, and was not something that happened with the somewhat alarming regularity and randomness it does here. Kids will burst into tears without apparent cause and refuse to share the reason for their sudden waterworks until the teacher has spent at least 10 minutes getting five different versions of what happened from a chorus of explanations offered by their classmates. More often than not they are crying because of something they thought someone said about them to someone else which turns out to be considered willfully misunderstood by the accused bad guy and the whole thing is resolved by the teacher saying "whatever you said, don't say it."

As for the coma thing... there are a few kids who will just freeze up and refuse to do anything at random intervals. There is one in grade 4 who is perfectly normal one minute and then next minute he is crying with his head between his knees and refuses to explain anything. This morning it was quite funny during the sports day opening ceremony rehearsal because everyone was sitting down and he was the only one left standing because he had decided to do his "limp rag" routine. Shingaki sensei pulled him outside and chatted to him for a while to little avail because when he came back he just stood at the back looking as though someone had stolen his soul and refused to participate in anything further.

Maybe I just have a skewed version of primary school because let's face it, I was one of the goody goody two shoes who always did her work quickly and well and who actually enjoyed reading and stuff that most other kids seem to hate. But it seems like there are no rules here. Or at least, there are no well defined consequences for breaking the rules. In every classroom when I was little there was a massive poster explaining the STEPS. ie. the steps the teacher would take to punish you if you broke the rules. Usually it was all warning warning warning, ok time out and that was as far as it went, sometimes a kid would get a detention but that was positively gossip-worthy. Here there are no set rules for disciplining the kids, each teacher seems to make it up themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'd be interested to know whether the school even has a discipline policy and what each teacher thinks the steps are for dealing with troublesome kids. (And I'd also like them to use these rules in my classes so the kids don't fuck around so much and give me a headache) :)