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Dahlia Ahmad watched as her Taiwanese student Jason pushed one of his classmates.
The little girl stumbled on her feet. Jason burst into giggles. The girl almost hit the ground face-first. Dahlia moved purely out of reflex. She reached, clutched the girl by her shirt before she could fall, and pulled her into a standing position.
After ensuring her student was okay, Dahlia whipped her head and narrowed her eyes.
"Jason," she hissed through gritted teeth. The utterance of the name was sounding like more of a plea for help than a call for discipline day by day.
"All of you take a step forward. Jason, you come and stand besides me," Dahlia instructed.
"Teacher, teacher please I'll behave," he started crying.
"Oh, and tomorrow you're getting timeout as well!" she added in a jesting tone.
He started pleading harder. Jason's classmates began to laugh at the situation.
Dahlia paid no heed to his attempt at throwing a tantrum and left the kid with no choice but to move besides her. Dahlia placed her arms around his shoulders. From a distance it looked like she was hugging him, but only she knew the difficulty she was facing to keep her hands in place.
Jason kept bouncing on his toes and flailing his arms in the air.
"Behave," she said in a firm voice.
If anything, it fueled the kid's desire to struggle against her harder. Now, they were catching attention. From a distance anyone could mistake that she was hurting him, so Dahlia had to let go of him.
But she wrapped her around his arm. In the process, his hand knocked off the dupatta off her right shoulder. Dahlia internally let out another groan and looked to her right to put it back in place.
"Della, Della look who is here." Azar Fayyad's voice chimed like bells. "Kaveh is here."
Dahlia straightened and looked up. In the background, she could hear her colleague Alana, and Azar's class teacher, chiding the kid for addressing another teacher like that. From the front, Kaveh Fayyad smiled at her.
"Hello."
It was starting to seem like he had taken her joke to greet each other a little too seriously.
Nonetheless, Dahlia smiled back, midst her struggle with Jason, and returned his greeting. Kaveh's eyes trailed down and landed to the little boy.
