Jack said, "Teacher! Finish!"
By this, he meant he was finished. Jack is not a high level student. He's a low-level student, even in the context of a low-level class. I think he's a fifth grader. I looked down at Jack's quiz. He'd answered maybe 6 of the 20 questions. So his maximum possible score was 6/20 – if there were no mistakes, which I couldn't be confident of.
I said, "This is terrible."
Jack said, fairly quickly, "I am terrible because you teach me that way."
He was grinning up at me as he said it. I knew immediately that he meant it as a joke.
And it blew me away. Not because it was effectively an insult. I have a pretty casual class, anyway, and in the spirit of communicativeness, the kids know I overlook what Korean teachers would not tolerate. No, I was blown away because it was probably the first fully formed, coherent English sentence I'd ever heard Jack articulate.
In fact, I felt quite pleased, because it vindicated exactly that open spirit of communication I tried to foster. Once he had something he wanted to say, he decided to say it.
I laughed. "I see. We'll have to work on that."
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
Your story reminds me of when my son was just learning to speak. We were visiting his grandparents, and grandpa entertained us all with one of his long stories of questionable veracity. As grandpa concluded his story, he looked at my son and asked him what he thought. My son, from his active vocabulary of just a few 100 words, replied in Bavarian dialect without skipping a beat: “What bullshit.”
We all laughed, knowing perfectly well from whom he must have learned that phrase. Fruits of the teacher, as you say.