Filed under: students
My little babies, the kindergarten kids, like to come flying at me with hugs, which is really adorable. However, they are at just the height that my stomach takes the weight of their head, and at 8:30 in the morning, after a weekend of food poisoning, I realllly couldn’t handle that. So the Thai teacher explained that today, high fives were ok but that hugs were not – so when we were doing our warm up, prancing about and such, and I said “show me your stomachs!” (we had just learned the body parts and OH MY WORD you should see their little 5 year old wiggles and sashays when they have to show me their hips) several of them decided to show me MY stomach. Rather pointedly.
groooaaann.
This next happened in my last class, and all of these things happened in a single 50 minute period. Grade one students. I have no curriculuum right now – exams are done and we’re playing the waiting game until end of term. So they all gathered around on the floor for storytime (you should see them RUN when I pull out the book, and 30 six year olds chanting and acting along with you – beat THAT, bedtime story!).
28 of them were sitting. One boy was lying on his back, giggling. One boy was massaging and grabbing said boy’s penis, also giggling. THAT’S RECESS PLAY BOYS.
Another boy grabbed my skirt and tried to pull it up as I walked by. KID’S SIX.
Then, because we had read “Where the Wild Things Are” , I sent them back to their desks to draw their own monsters. WELL. One boy drew enormous breasts on his monster. Kid beside him yelled “Teacher! Teacher!” but, being an ESL student, he needed to mime, so he told on the kid by demonstrating breasts on himself. I walked over, and walked away trying very very hard not to laugh audibly and several boys, upon finding that Hun was not in trouble (because what can you do, really?! Right now he just associates breasts with his mom) and that teacher was amused, all stood up and started demonstrating their rather large breasts. Anything to make teacher laugh.
Oh dear.
Filed under: being foreign, idiocy (my own), idiocy (other people's), students, travelling
Two weeks tomorrow, I will:
- be finished working the asshole who says ‘black people look like monkeys’ and ’some rape is consensual’, the dumbass who needed help to buy condoms because at 24 years of age, she thought the pink box was for girls and the blue box was for boys, and the girl who knew a few Koreans in Chicago and thinks that trumps a year’s experience in the country. Seriously, in her first week, bitch corrected my pronunciation on my kid’s names.
- be finished working 12 hour days. Whoever thought 9 hours of teaching a day was a good idea was clearly smoking laced crack.
- be finished trying to impress middle school kids. Somehow, when I’m telling jokes and nobody’s laughing for three. hours. straight. I feel like the most uncool kid in the classroom. I’m the teacher.
- be finished packing.
- be on a plane to MOTHERFUCKING BANGKOK.
Reasons I am excited for Bangkok:
- the name.
- Tigers and elephants and monkeys, oh my!
- A more diverse city, including a visible gay community and more races than ‘Korean’ and ‘English Teacher’.
- Beaches
- Rainforests
- A city where drugs are available. No, I am not planning to partake – sounds like a great way to get the HIV or find myself sentenced to death, but Korea’s weird – drugs are literally not available here. Bangkok, for that reason alone, will attract a much different crowd.
- A civilised work schedule. Breaks between classes? No high school kids? Less than 4 teaching hours a day? Sick days? Sign me the fuck up.
- A more adventurous crowd of expats (hopefully) instead of the incestuous douchebaggery reminiscent of a high school cafeteria.
Reasons I will miss Korea:
- The willingness of the Koreans to bend over backwards to understand me, as long as I don’t attempt to speak their language.
- The women who walk beside me to share their umbrella or their fan when I forget mine.
- Drinking with strangers who offer me drinks on my birthday.
- Knowing all my bartenders personally.
- Children who are respectful and polite and carry things on the elevator for me, right before counting my fat rolls.
- Public drunkeness. Seriously. That will never get old. A new electronics mart opened across the street from work the other day, and their promotion? Giving away free beer. There I was, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, walkind down the street with a paper cup of beer.
Funny things I have done recently
- Had a class full of eight year olds running around with their hands clapped over their ears shrieking “No potato, teacher! No potato!”. I told them their ears were dirty enough to grow potatoes.
- Had a class full of seven year olds with gold stickers all over their faces. They got a sticker every time they got a word right and I had nowhere else to put them.
- Got away with watching ‘Mulan’ in a senior class.
Yesterday, I was playing chopsticks with one of my students. I have no idea how to play chopsticks. I lost before he told me the rules. Then he yelled “You LOST, you WAYGOOK!” He was delighted with himself.
“That was pretty rude,” I said. He didn’t get it.
“But…that just means you’re not Korean!”
“I know it means foreigner,” I said. “But listen to this: ‘you got the answer wrong, you stupid Korean.’ Same thing, right?”
“Oohhh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
(This is the same student who wrote ‘waygookin’ on my arm – in case people didn’t know that I’m not Korean. I couldn’t stand out more here if I tried.)
Knowing my luck, though, that was the precise minute that my boss turned the camera on in my classroom, heard only that line, and thinks I’m a bloody racist.
Awesome.
Last week, I walked into my classroom to find that my students had been writing on the white board. Amongst the usual monsters, pictures of ‘ugly teacher’, ‘we want pizza’s’, there was, in big letters the middle of the board, the following gem:
“Yellow Hair, go back to Canada!”
….Lovely.
Today, I walked to the back of the room while my students were working on their grammar exercises, and had been for 10 minutes. “WJ,” I said to one of my students. “Where’s your pencil?”
He looked at me like a sad cow. “No.”
“No? What do you mean no?”
He shrugged.
“Do you have a pencil?”
“No.”
“Were you going to ask for one?”
“No.”
“Were you planning on just sitting there for the whole three hours?
Sad cow eyes.
siiiigggghhhh
Yesterday, a student threw an eraser at my face. It bounced off, I blinked. “OUT!” I roared. Then, my counselor made him cry.
Another kid got up to pour pepsi on a classmate’s head. When he sat down, his chair had been pulled out and he landed on the floor.
Karma’s a bitch.
A little while ago, we level-tested all of our students. We put our senior level students through an extra oral test so that we could rank and stream them into new classes.
Right before the test, I caught a kid with a water gun. Water guns are not allowed, especially not in an unsupervised classroom, so I confiscated it. I’m a grownup, and confiscating toys is part of my job.
Then I left my students to write essays and wait their turn to be tested orally (‘oral test’ was starting to sound gross), and I went into the testing room with the other teachers.
I still had the water gun.
The students, nervous and quiet, filed in four at a time and sat opposite four teachers with marking schemes in front of them. Every time they opened their mouths to talk, a new little number was added to the marking scheme of all four teachers. “Ye have been judged!” that little number said.
They were not happy campers.
On the way out, each student got squirted with my water gun.
Later, as the testing was finished, I started spraying the other teachers, and it turned into a bit of a water fight in the hallway. When I got into the classroom, my pent-up students jumped on me, got the gun, and I definitely got a revenge-soak.
Later, one of the Korean staff told me that carrying a water gun around school was not exactly professional.
Obviously. I spend my day with 12 year olds. How professional do you expect me to be, exactly?
The blatant rudeness of my students will never cease to amaze me.
Let me start by saying that they’ve cut off water to my entire city. My apartment, this morning, had no hot water so my shower was sketchy at best and I’m not as clean as I’d like to be. To compensate, I’m wearing a dress. I like to look good when I feel like crap.
The dress I’m wearing has small sleeves. I didn’t really think about it, because I rarely have occasion to raise my arms in class. But today my arms did go up. NEWSFLASH: the pits don’t get shaved every day. On a day with no hot water, they are NOT A PRIORITY. Well, when my arm went up, my sleeve slipped. A little hair was showing for people who were looking for it.
AND MY STUDENTS SURE WERE. They spent the next ten minutes trying to get my arm up again, by tricking me, yanking on my arm, pulling at my sleeve……WHAT THE HELL?
THEY’RE FRIGGEN 12.
Hey, remember that kid who carried homophobia across the Pacific Ocean and straight into my classroom?
Remember how I patiently explained allll about homophobia, and rationally and politely asked him to refrain from that kind of behaviour in my classroom? How I respectfully asked his opinion before handing down the decree? How I made him understand why it was bad instead of simply banning it?
He was recently moved up a level, into a different teacher’s class. The teacher came to me one days and said, “Hey, you know what Jack’s taken to calling me?”
“What?” I said. “Bad teacher? Fat? Let me guess. He think you’re pregnant too!”
“No,” he said. “He’s been calling me ‘Homo’.”
So, instead of making a kid understand something, I just annoyed the kid to the point where the fun in making fun of gays didn’t outweigh the tedium of listening to me talk about gays.
WIN.
Today was Teacher’s Day in Korea. Happy day, teachers!
Today, my kids:
- Asked for pizza
- Asked me if I was pregnant
- Told me I was fat
- Told me that their last teacher got them pizza
- Looked at me like sad cows when I asked them a question
- Called me ‘bad teacher’
- Threw bits of eraser around the room
- Spit on my floor and called it a ’skill’
- Stole my bugles (slash dinner for those of us who are nutrionally inclined)
- Didn’t bring their books to class
I sang ‘Happy Teacher’s Day’ to myself.
From Students:
“Ouch!.. Teacher, do I say ‘drat’ or ’shit’?”
“Clooney – what is it you are pretending to throw at me?”
“Ddong”
“Teacher! You are single, so every night, you watch 19 TV, yes?”
On the Great Wall of China:
“Hey, remember that time I couldn’t walk because I had too much sex? This is going to be way worse.”
At the bar:
“We’re not in Russia…..we’re in CHINA”
Over lunch:
“I have no problem with crotch hair. Sometimes you just have a little *cough cough* because there’s a hair at the back of your throat, but no big deal.”
“Oh yeah? Sometime I have a little *cough cough* because there’s a penis at the back of my throat*
