I went into the classroom at nearly 10 pm, and Jeongjae and Donghun were still in there, studying for some vocabulary quiz, presumably. But Jeongjae was looking at his math book.
“You guys are still here?” I asked.
“Yeaaasss,” intoned Jeongjae in that laconic voice of his.
I pointed at his math book. “That doesn’t look like English,” I observed.
He glared down at the offending text as if it had suddenly appeared on his desk unexpectedly. He pondered his predicament for only a moment.
“Ohhh. but Teacher! There is x! X is English.”
“Yes, I think that’s English,” his friend agreed.
I couldn’t really argue. Though maybe “x” is more Latin, than English, in a math problem. But, well… who was I to argue? (Note that the image is not Jeongjae’s math problem – just a random image of a math problem in Korean with an ‘x’ in it that I grabbed out of the intertubes. I’m not sure Korean 7th graders are doing precalculus.)
