Fun with Oxford Class

Instead of chronicling the day-to-day stuff, I put together a collection of little classroom moments I want to make sure I remember.  To fill in some of the gaps, the name of my classroom is Oxford.  The other seven-year-old classrooms are Stanford, Yale, and Harvard.  It's a theme, you see.

I teach fourteen kids. I was supposed to have seven, and the other seven would go into the now-unused Harvard class with an additional teacher.  Due to budget cuts, I have the entire upper-level seven-year-olds to myself.

(I should mention: Seven years old in Korean is actually closer to 5 or 6.  In Korea, babies are one year old the day are born.  Then, on January first, you tack on another year.  So, from my understanding, you could have a kid born on December 31st who would be considered two years old a day later.)

Anyway, it's still a blast most of the time.  And these are some of the aspects of teaching that I want to remember years from now.

Like during the field trip to the park, for example.

The Thumb Princess

Sometimes the pseudo-English that you hear and read turns out to be inscrutably fascinating.  One phrase sticks out in particular.  

I was reading through the kids’ diaries.  (It’s not a breach of privacy; it’s my job.)  In it, they’re supposed to talk about what they did over the weekend.  Barbara (who, incidentally, is about 4’6” tall and whose father is around 7’, no foolin') wrote about a musical she saw.  The magical, mysterious line that she wrote, the one I can’t understand and which pops into my head from time to time, is:

“A thumb princess pretty.  A thumb princess breakdown.”

I don’t know what a thumb princess is.  I can’t imagine a princess who is also a thumb being pretty.  I don’t know why she broke down.  I don’t know what Korean word Mommy and Daddy mistranslated so that it became “breakdown.”  I don’t know why, even after days of going over the importance of including verbs in all of our sentences, Barbara refuses to use them in her diary. 

I don’t know any of these things, and I never will.  I could easily Google it and answer all of my questions in a few seconds, but I'd rather live with the mystery.

Hypocritical Intelligences

The rule of thumb(princess) that I’ve learned so far is that kids are incredibly clever and equally surprisingly stupid.  (I mean that in an endearing way.) Sunny, the same bilingual kindergartner that tells me about how the CO2 cycle works, can name most of the countries on the globe, and asked about what root languages English stems from, is the same kid who can’t wipe his own ass.  

With that nonchalant lean,
 he looks like someone who could sell you life insurance--
not somebody who needs instructions to use the toilet.

A typical exchange between me and Sunny:

“Chad Teacher, may I go to the bath-uh-room?”

(The extra syllable is a holdover from Korean pronunciation.)

“Yes, Sunny.”

He waits and looks at me…

“What is it, Sunny?”

He whispers in my ear, “Chad Teacher: Poo-poo.”

Then, I call the head Korean teacher (Janice Teacher) to check on him in the bathroom, since I’m pretty sure any help I could give would be disgusting at best.  (Is it sexist if I sometimes relish the fact that men aren't expected to take care of this sort of thing in Korea [and most places]? The answer is "Yes.")


Thankfully, last week, he stopped informing me of which type of excretion he will be performing, so he either: 1) learned to wipe over the course of a weekend; 2) is back in diapers; or 3) has some very upset parents when they see his underwear in the laundry.  

Example #2 of Baffling Buffoonery

As long as we’re talking about silliness, I should mention Justin.  Justin is a very unique boy who is excited about everything and quick to pick up on the lessons while simultaneously being as dumb as a rock of boxes.

Here's Justin, lost in thought.

The way lunches work at Hope School, the teacher dishes out all of the food to each student, and then we all eat together in our classroom.  In the past week, Justin has thrown up his food every other day at lunch, which brings his barfing average up to .500.  And what’s more is that he doesn’t even make a fuss about it.  One minute everyone is eating quietly, and the next, Justin has regurgitated squid and seaweed on top of his rice.   He comes up to me, unfazed, and says, “Chad Teacher, I got sick…Can I have more rice?”

I kept a watchful eye on him the next lunch to see why it was happening, considering he wasn’t sick in any other way.  I have a hypothesis that I'm working under until I find evidence to the contrary:

As far as I can tell, Justin doesn't realize that human beings have a gag reflex.  Seriously. He will take his chopsticks when he isn't eating and push them absent-mindedly too far into his mouth.  After doing this, he'll have a quick little convulsion.  Almost like it was a GAG REFLEX or something. 

Pictured: Justin at age 37.

I didn’t say anything to him because, at this point, it seemed like a silly hypothesis. But sure, enough, yesterday, on Thursday, May 10^th, 2012, Justin threw up again.  All over his rice.  Again.  This time, I had him clean up the mess. (We're supposed to push them to be independent.  And although I try to make it sound gross for the sake of the story, the rice was relatively throw-up free.)

When the kids have extra food they can’t finish, I have them take their trays to the serving table at the back of the room and dump it into the rice pot.  Justin missed the pot, and all of his rice ended up on the floor.  Naturally. He said, “Chad Teacher, I spilled!”  “Get a tissue and clean it up, Justin.”  He grabbed a wet-wipe, picked up a big hunk of the stuff, and put it in one of the empty pots.  I watched to make sure he could do it on his own.  Then, after I hadn’t looked over for maybe a moment or two, I checked back in on him.

He was squatting down and eating the vomit-rice off the ground.  Grain by grain.  Like a monkey delousing his friend.

I sort of froze for a second, and I’m ashamed to say that in my shock, Justin was able to put scarf down another two grains of rice. 

“JUSTIN! What are you doing?” I said, not in an accusatory tone, but in a way someone would yell a sincere question while still in disbelief.

“Sorry, Teacher,” he said, and went about cleaning the rest of it up with a tissue.

The thing is, we had extra rice, so if he was starving, he knew he could have had that.

I don’t understand these kids sometimes.

That Wacky Little Dangle

I’ve learned to ALWAYS check the videos before you play them for the kids.  Even the most innocuous looking ones can surprise you.  I opened up a video called “Friendship,” that inadvertently exposed my kids to a waterfall of “f**ks” before I could cut it off. (Thank God they don’t know what it means, or it would’ve started a Hope School-wide epidemic.)

One day, they said they wanted to watch the “Crazy Frog” video.  I only knew enough about Crazy Frog to know that it’s an obnoxiously catchy song for kids.  Normally, I don't take requests, but it was before class was supposed to start, so I let them pick.  Turns out, it’s a French-language music video that stars a computer-animated frog riding rockets and dodging the bad guy while singing a remake of the Beverly Hills Cop theme “Axel F.” While you might not know it by name, I’m sure you know it by heart.

The Crazy Frog version that ostensibly seems like a kid-oriented music video, decided to add a realistically rendered, dangling, floppy, HUMAN penis to the main character for some reason.  Seriously.

WHY?!

I can’t understand it from any context.  And to think that it was an intentional design choice!  I just picture some guy on the computer animation team sitting and animating it for hours on end:

“Well, Crazy Frog’s invisible motorcycle banked left here, so I’ll have to account for that in our calculations.  Also, when he falls off the building, should I build an independent physics model to account for the flap due to penile wind resistance?”

Luckily, the kids didn’t start yelling out “Chad Teacher! Pee-pee!”  Actually, they didn’t notice at all, or they didn’t care.  Apparently, Korean culture is way more open to non-sexual nudity than we are. Just this week, the six-year-olds down my hall actually had a sex-ed lesson minus the actual sex part, so I guess “anatomy class” would be a better choice of words.

Still, I can’t get over the fact that they put a mammalian penis on an amphibian.  We all remember from our Bio 101 courses (which make us experts in everything “biology”) that frogs reproduce by ejecting their eggs and sperm into the water from their cloaca, and therefore have no need for external genitalia.

I'm ranting now.  It just really surprised me.  The fact that something like this can just pop up on the internet is disconcerting.

And I’ve now written more about Crazy Frog’s wang than any other Korean topic so far.

Prosody: The Terrible Melody of Korean English

The Korean word for “no” is “ah-nee-yo.”  So when the kids say “No,” which is about every five seconds, they drag it out: “NOoooOOOewww!”  I’ve mapped out the melodic intervals that occur using my extensive, mostly impractical knowledge of musical theory. I identified an emphasis on the diminished fifth, which is labeled, academically, as the "tritone" and, colloquially, as the Diabolus in Musica or "The Devil in Musical Form." Think of the opening notes from Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."

Of course, I'm just hyperbolizin'.  It actually sounds like this:

"Funky" Chickens

I nicknamed one of my students Funky Chicken on the first day in class because his mom always styles his hair up into a feathered mohawk.  Plus, it was clear from day one that he needed to be taken down a peg.  His name is Gordon.  He’s a little punk sometimes and also a little awesome. 

See?

One of the girls, Ruri, loves to tease everybody, so whenever Gordon does something silly, she likes to say, “Funky Chicken Gordon!”

Or, at least, that’s what she tries to say because it sounds EXACTLY like, “F*cky chicken, Gordon!” 

It’s a subtle difference, but one that I feel changes the meaning ever-so-slightly.

Without ever discussing with each other it before, Tim (a 25-year-old who teaches there, too) said he found out about it and wasted about five minutes of class one day asking her to say "Funky Chicken" over and over again.  This kind of thing makes me worry about who we are letting teach our children.

Here's a young go-getter after a long night of "teaching."

And while we're on the subject of swearing, in my first week of teaching, one of my students kept saying, "Beesh!"  I didn't know what it meant, but he kept using it and then giggling.  As in "Lynn is a beesh! Heeheehee." Finally, when he said, "Chad Teacher is a beesh!" it suddenly clicked that he meant "bitch." It was obvious he didn't know just how bad the word was, but, boy howdy, did I ever lay the smack down on him.

To Pay the Teacher's Toll: 

A Short Horror Story

I’ve been having audio hallucinations for the past two months.  I feel like my apartment is haunted.  A better explanation is that I’m going crazy.  

Have you ever been to the beach all day, and when you go home at night to lay down, you can feel the steady waves rocking you softly back and forth?  Can you hear them, too?

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head?  Only, it’s not in your head.   You swear that it’s coming from somewhere else.  Maybe your neighbor’s playing it.  Or maybe it’s blasting from the windows of a car driving by.  It can’t be in your head.  Because it sounds so real.

I know the feeling. 

When I’m alone, I hear an ethereal call.  It beckons from the depths of my mind.

“Teacher! …Teacher! …Teacher!” 

The hauntings began one week after starting work in Korea.  I’m afraid that my dreams and reality have merged. I can’t remember what it was like before it began.  Did I ever really live without this curse?  I cannot answer. And now it never stops…

“…Teacher.”

I’ll be there in a minute, Justin.

“…Teacher!”

Hold on, Barbara.  I’m helping Justin.

“…Teacher!”

Sunny, you know I’m busy right now helping Justin, then Barbara, then Lucy. And then Tommy. Ruri, Gordon, Chris, Amy, Annie, Ian, James, Jean, and Laura.

…

“TEACHER!!!”

OXFORD! How many Chad Teachers are there?

The voices recede for a moment.  I relish it.  Then the specters mumble in unison:

“…one.”

And how many students?

They mumble doubly:

“…fourteen.”

Can I help all of you at once?

They pause as if to think.

“…No…”

That’s right.

Silence washes over the room as I find an uneasy peace.

Calming thoughts come to the fore, taking advantage of the voices' ephemeral recession.  I almost drift 

off to sleep.  I can feel it coming because I cease to feel anything.

And then—

“TEEEEEAAAAACCCCCCHHHHHHEEEEEERRRRR!!!!!!!!!”

I gasp.

I am not Chad.

I am not myself.

I have no name. 

           

I am only...

Teacher.

And One Last Thought about Teaching... 

...there are boogers.  Boogers everywhere.

Not really a surprise.