All quiet on the homefront. Events at the homestay have been pretty tame for the past few days. Jun and Jin have returned to a normal school schedule from the lighter summer sessions and I am gathering the distinct sense of routine. There was one noteworthy exception as of this past Sunday which began as an innocent trip to the Cheongju printing museum and ended as an epic cross-town cultural enlightenment for both Jin and myself as we stumbled upon a festival that culminated in a two-block long game of tug-of-war. But that's a story for another time, another post.
Today I want to do a bit of housecleaning and share some of the gems my students have written in the past few days. I've been saving some of the more creative creations from my classes to highlight some of the humor I encounter with middle school boys.
Last week I played a game called 'Telephone' with the guys. The class divides into three lines and the first student is handed a written sentence to quickly commit to memory. After I say 'go', the student whispers the sentence to the next classmate in line and so on - until the final student on the team writes down what he hears and returns the entry to me. What follows are two sentences returned to me in italics and my original prompt in parentheses:
The bank I love you. (The bank has all my money)
Scor I love you. (Soccer is my favorite sport to watch)
The first week we played a game called 'Guess Who'. Students are divided into two teams and then write sentences about themselves. I then switch the entries and a student reads the clues to his own squad as they try to guess who on the other team wrote the sentences. Here are some of the stronger entries:
I look like bear.
I'm a difficult man.
I'm a cold man of city but I'm kind to my girl.
I live in Earth.
My favorite subject is mathmatics and science. I especially like M-they and superstring theory at physics.
I have a head.
I don't have knowledge.
I'm handsome boy.
I'm moneky boy = I'm hairy.
I want many building and Audi car.
I am God.
As you might have deduced - there is a wide dichotomy of ability levels. This week I finally had a set schedule and felt that I could proceed with the early material I had planned. This involves an introduction about me (school, family, work experiences, interests, etc.) as well as the picking of English names by the students. Certain choices could be predicted (Obama, various classroom objects, and famous athletes) but others could only be thought of by adolescent boys:
Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumble Bee (Transformers is not only a popular film franchise, but a universal language amongst boys)
Abracadabra
Hitler (I think this is going to have to change - I can't imagine calling on 'Hitler' to fill in the blank with a vocabulary word - but I'm still thinking of how to describe - in very basic English - why this is not exactly what we are striving for with this lesson)
God
Me
Harry Potter (perhaps the most popular thus far)
Tiffany (from what I can piece together, this is a popular female musician in Korea, but seeing as how this person's neighbor in class picked a part of the male anatomy for his name, I had more glaring issues than gender identification to address at the moment)
And by far and large, my favorite lesson has been 'Two Truths and a Lie'. As the name implies, players write three sentences about themselves; one is a lie and two are true. As became painfully apparent with some entries, the strategy for plausability was lost on many students. That being said, while many students have underdeveloped English skills, they clearly have fully developed senses of humor:
1. I'm not human.
2. I'm Devil.
3. I'm human.
1. I have small eyes.
2. I'm happy now.
3. I'd sad now.
1. I am drink soju (Korean rice alcohol) many time.
2. I have eigoana (spelling preserved).
3. Teacher nosunyang is very pretty. (This was the lie and this was also the co-teacher for the period - not a very nice thing to put into Two Truths and Lie)
1. I'm male.
2. I know right answer.
3. I'm female.
1. I have 5 mothers.
2. I have 0 father.
3. I am 175 cm.
1. I live in Sannam Bong.
2. I have a computer.
3. I can walk on the water.
1. I'm happy.
2. I'm sad.
3. I'm tired.
1. I don't like adult video.
2. I like idol music.
3. I'm not (what follows I could not read, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't rewrite it even if it had been legible)
1. I adore apple.
2. I like a banana.
3. I love a kiwi.
1. I have correction tape.
2. I have ball point pen.
3. I have pencil. (This entry was humorous because it was written in ballpoint pen and corrected numerous times with correction tape)
1. I'm alive.
2. I believe I can fly.
3. I love me.
1. I know someone called Starscream.
2. I know how the superstring theory from the Beta function.
3. I know what Einstein's field equation mean.
1. I'm Jesus.
2. U.S.A. was built by me.
3. My grandfather is 2MB. (2MB is a nickname for the president)
Teaching has been the hardest element of this grant. I am consistently exhausted after a day at school. Amid the hourly battles to maintain order and the challenges of finding the correct level of English for each class, I am often provided with fun anecdotes such as these. Now if I could only speak Korean...if the entries above are any indication of my students' capabilities with wit, I strongly suspect the real humor in the classroom lies not with English, but with the language my students know so well and I do not.
