Category: Kids

Students pass notes, as I’ve observed before. And then teachers – at least, curious and somewhat authoritarian teachers such as myself – confiscate notes, not to punish but more as a study in adolescent anthropology. But this student’s note (I’m not sure if he wrote it, or his friend, and I’m not sure it matters who wrote it) is quite incomprehensible.

Without stating the boy’s name, I will only point out –  for those not familiar with Korean handwriting – that the boy’s name is the only writing in the note. It’s repeated between equals signs, except for the final not-equals sign. So you might say the content of the note, roughly, is as follows:

To Joe
Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe = Joe ≠ Joe
From Joe

As the title says, this seems like narcissism, with an existential crisis right at the end.

I was trying to explain the word “cherish” to a class. One student, Jinu, stood up from his seat and began a bizarre mime, swinging one arm in and out and swaying his hips strangely.

“What are you doing?” I asked, although such outbursts of randomness were common from Jinu, who is entering the 5th grade next month.

“I am a drunk cellist,” he explained. I realized he’d misunderstood “cherish” as “cellist.” Still, I’m not sure that explains the need to be a drunk one, though there was a running joke in the class a while back that his handwriting resembled that of a drunk octopus.

The same Jinu has some unusual talents. He writes very convincing Korean in Roman characters – he’s better at ad-hoc romanization than many adult Koreans I’ve met. Here are two samples from a recent quiz.

The first, “mor~ra yo!” is 몰라요 [mol-la-yo = I don’t know]. The second, “bbang Jum ee ye yo” is 빵점이에요 [ppang-jeom-i-e-yo = that’s zero points].

Needless to say, despite his romanization talents, it was, indeed, zero points.

My fifth-grade student makes clear she’s not going to put up with this ridiculous imaginative exercise she’s being asked to engage in.

Teacher: "How are you today?"

Student: "Fine!"

Teacher: "Good."

Student: "Very fine!"

Teacher: "Really? Why?"

Student, laughing: "Because of Ken's haircut."

Ken is a co-teacher of mine. Apparently his haircut made my student's day. It got her speaking at above-level English competence and confidence, at the least.

My youngest students drew pictures. Here are some cute ones.

Meanwhile, a seventh grader who goes by Paul and/or Pablo surprised me with a surprisingly well-excuted doodle of some fish in the middle of some notes from the grammar class that preceded my debate class.

Paul's combination of genial polymath and utter disorganization remind me a little bit of … me, at that age. I find him both annoying and charming.

I use a color printer and print out and cut up my play money which I give out to students as incentives and rewards. They can then spend their savings in my “store” or use them to buy the conventional “Karma” stamps that the other teachers use and which can go toward coupon books for local businesses (this is boring and not very incentivizing, in my opinion, which is why I started doing my play money).

My play money is called “Alligator bucks.” And long ago, when I was doing it at Hongnong Elementary, I became aware that there was a certain class of student who would use technology to try to increase his wealth. I have a student, currently, who took some alligator bucks home, scanned them, and then printed them out on a color printer of his own. Their quality is pretty good, and they are now in circulation. But they’re not perfect – and mostly I got lucky because I had preemptively taken to using a stamp with a fairly unique design to stamp the backs of the alligator bucks. Two-sided color copying is more challenging.

This is all par-for-the-course when dealing with a large and diverse group of grade-schoolers. But what’s interesting and funny to me, today, is that I saw this enterprising young future mafioso passing out his counterfeit alligator bucks to his friends for free, and he was signing each one – like little works of art. This seemed to defeat the purpose of counterfeiting them, but it was very cute. He was buying status with his fake alligator bucks, just winning the admiration of his peers for having tried to make them. He signed one on the back and gave it to me, grinning. “Do you like it?” he asked. “I like it so much.”

I have a student Mingyu who wrote this in his recent diary essay book.

I had a stomachache because I ate pizza, banana, lemon and bread. In fact I had a stomachache from yesterday when I went to math academy but I was very feel sick at the stomachache. So so I went to bathroom and I threw up all I had eaten. I went home I don't eat anything and I sleep.

I need to discuss the concepts of  "over-sharing" and "TMI."

Yesterday in one of my elementary classes, we were playing a game. One of the 4th grade boys was so excited that when he raised his hand, he fell out of his chair. It was quite comic – it had the appearance of someone yanking up his arm so hard that he flew into the air and landed on the floor, but he did it on his own. The other kids laughed, and so he hammed a little bit after that.

The other kids began joking around (in Korean) that he was like a broken machine or toy, and someone said he was 중국산 (chung-guk-san = “product of China”). This was humorous, too. We all laughed. For the rest of the class, we had a little meme going, where anytime someone made a mistake, there would be a chorus of “중국산!” [Product of China]. I guess it was funny – it shows that China’s reputation for mass-produced crap is not just confined to the US.

Here follows an actual conversation with one of my favorite seven year old students:
“Hi. How are you?”
“I’m happy!”
“Good. What are you doing?”
“Water. 물.” He was translating – for himself, or to make sure he was getting the right word with me. He was standing at the water cooler, putting water in one of those envelope-shaped paper cups. Children seem to find drinking water this way endlessly entertaining.
“Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yes.”
“Good. What did you do?” I was going out on a limb in asking this question, because it was somewhat beyond little Jinyong’s level of English ability.
Without hesitation, and with a straight face, he answered, “똥먹었다!” As cheerful and as pleased as can be.
I burst out laughing. You see, “똥먹었다” means “I ate shit.” Seriously.
On the one hand, I was very proud of the kid – he’d understood a question I hadn’t expected him to (past tense, open-ended), and answered it (although in Korean) with communicative competence. The whole conversation showed a higher level of comprehension than I’d expected from him – he’s probably my lowest ability student. So I felt proud.
At the same time, it was a rather disgusting answer. He’s what you might call a potty-mouthed kid. He’s a Korean version of a character from South Park. So his answer wasn’t exactly unprecedented. It was funny.
I was laughing too much to continue the conversation. And I unintentionally reinforced his disgusting sense of humor by laughing at his statement. Ah well. Life goes on.

Pretty much self-explanatory – assuming you know what pikachu and aquajet are (they’re cartoon-based things, highly relevant and meaningful to the seven-year-old set).

The forlorn figure at the bottom left is, obviously, Jared.

Walking home from work, there was a thermometer that said -10 C (about 15 F). It’s windy. It would appear Siberia has dropped by for a visit.

Yesterday, in my youngest Phonics class, made up of mostly 1st graders, Yunho announced he had a booger.
He was speaking Korean (“코딱지!” [kottakji = booger]), and I had a weird moment when I reflected on my strange plateau of Korean language knowledge. It can’t be normal for someone to understand a child’s discourse on boogers but not be able to understand an adult’s request for a suggestion (which also occured yesterday).
Yunho wasn’t finished with his booger. He grabbed scotch tape out of my basket of classroom supplies and taped his booger to his finger. The other boys in the class thought this was the grandest achievement in recent human  memory, and promptly set out to replicate it. I had to confiscate the tape and forcefully insist that everything end up in the trash.
The one girl in the class (who is also a year or two older) shook her head and clucked her tongue disapprovingly at the whole proceeding. Understandably.