Abusing My Power?

I really love being an ESL teacher.  I basically just entertain myself in 50 minute intervals for six hours a day because my students rarely know what’s going on.  I sing to myself, laugh to myself, tell myself jokes….  My students often ask me what time it is and every single time I say “time to buy a watch hahaha.”  They never understand, they just stare at me and say “teachah, time whaaat??”  I refuse to answer with anything but “time to buy a watch.”  Refuse. 

Sometimes I’ll tell them to take out their books and they’ll go “teachahh, whhyyyyyyy” and I just respond “because ‘Y’ is a crooked letter,” admittedly a saying that I don’t even understand but my mother always said that to me whenever I asked too many ‘why’ questions.  Anyways, then I just giggle to myself because my students have no idea what I’m talking about.

I can get away with saying basically anything to them because they have no idea.  It’s sad sometimes when I have a really good quip or retort to something a student has said so I say it and then I laugh to myself for 5 minutes and my students just have blank stares.

I do love when a class just decides to repeat everything I say.  When I notice this happening, no matter what, no matter what transpires in between, I always make it end with “supercalifragilisticexmialidocious” because they end up just going “supercali-alalalalalalalalalalalalalala” and it’s hilarious.

I also love the things kids come up with.  Today, I had the class that is in competition with each other.  They were coloring and then going “Done! I am number one!”  “Done.  I am number two!” and so on.  I REALLY hate it so in the midst of it all I’m just sitting there yelling, “No one cares!  No one cares!  No one cares!” over and over until one students starts going “Yes one cares!  Yes on cares!  Yes one cares!”  Can’t argue with the logic.

Another treasure was the day one class was doing their reading book and one student saw a picture of what appeared to be a father so she took out her pencil and wrote “father” next to the picture with an arrow.  Then one of the students looked closer and it turns out the father only had one eye and thus was a cyclops.  The student who wrote ‘father’ in her book took a second look then exuded a look of horror as she gasped and yelled out “FATHER NOOOO!!!!” and feverishly erased her writing.  Hilarious I tell you.

Let's Caja The Fuck Outta Here

 

I went to Busan this weekend with two foreign coworkers at the prospect of drinking margaritas on the beach despite it not being remotely close to beach weather.

So we arrive at Busan station and as we are waiting for a Subway, two Korean girls come up to us and start talking to us.  They are like “so I guess you speak English so we thought we’d talk to you.”  Random but ok.  So we are talking to these girls for one or two minutes when Robbie, in attempt to keep the conversation going, asks the one girl if she grew up speaking Korean or English.  And then she told us about how she was born in Korea and was adopted and brought to America but then she found her birth parents and moved back to Korea and she discovered she has two older sisters (TWO OLDER SISTERS – that means her parents just had a third kid and were like “nope, we don’t want this one”) and she was going to her father’s 60^th birthday party.  First of all: waaaaaaaaaaaaayy too much information.  Second of all:  I obviously don’t know the details of her situation but if I were her, or her birth parents, or her adopted parents, or her siblings, I’d be PISSED OFF in all aspects.  But to each his own I guess….

Later on we find a hotel to stay at.  By the way, these hotels are awesome.  They just give you a little mat and you sleep on the floor.  I’m thinking of getting one for my room here.  Anyway, the hotel guy is showing us our room and then proceeds to demonstrate to us own to open and close the door.  Like, we’re foreigners, we’re not idiots.  I know you might think it’s one in the same, but give us a little credit, just a little.

We do some sight-seeing including hiking to a temple right next to the ocean at night and standing before the most gigantic Buddha I have ever seen in my entire life (it must have been three stories high) and everything is good. 

Then we go to meet up with a girl named Sunny I met in Yeosu.  She takes us around to a few bars including a bar called “Thursday Party” which sells flavored beer.  At first, like me, you might think “White Chocolate flavored beer?  Awesome!” but let me assure you that it is in fact, not awesome.  It’s too much white chocolate and barely any beer.  Bleh.  Anyway, we end up at a Macholi bar and they have plum flavored Macholi!  (I didn’t learn anything from the flavored beer incident.)  So I’m all “we have to get plum flavored Macoli!  Because I LOVE PLUMS.”  And it was delicious.  What wasn’t so delicious was as a side dish they served the worms that I tasted at Nagan.  Now everyone at the table was mocking me because I didn’t actually eat the worm at Nagan.  I put it in my mouth, bit down, and then spit it out.  So now I was under pressure to actually eat one.  And I did.  And it was gross.  But now I can say I have officially eaten a bug/worm thing.  Gross.

Sunny leaves but we continue our drinking shenanigans eventually ending up at a bar that’s playing awful techno music.  The guys at the bar, apparently inspired by the hypnotic beats, are dancing on the counter and taking their pants off to reveal their speedo-like under wear.  That was about when Meg turns to me and goes “Let’s caja (카 자<let’s go>) the fuck outta here.”  So we “cajaed the fuck outta there”  (I love that) and went back to the hotel. 

We were talking about movies and plays and Robbie had never heard of A Streetcar Named Desire (my all-time favorite play) so I was telling him he had to watch it.  The conversation eventually turning into talking about Darrell from The Office and Hot Tub Time Machine and before we all went to sleep Robbie goes “I’ll remember to watch  A Hot Tub Named Desire or whatever it’s called.

            Our last little adventure before calling it a weekend was sitting on the Subway and watching a 10-year-old looking kid lick the poles on the Subway train. Dis-gus-ting.  Overall, a really good weekend.

What's Your Name? What's Your Numba

Remember when you were a kid and you picked out all the names you were going to give to your hundreds of children that you were going to have?  You weren’t excited about having a hundred kids but you were excited that you got to give them all names.  The ideal situation was to just have one, name it, and then give it away.  Maybe this was just me, so I’ll get to my point.

At E-World, when we get new students we get to give them English names.  As you can imagine, the prospect of this is very very exciting to me.  When I found this out I made a list of girls names and boys names written down in the order that I would dole them out.

So far, I have only gotten the chance to name three students – all girls.  The first I named “Neely” for it is my dream to have an entire class named after Jacqueline Susann characters.  Neely, who is now Becky, didn’t like the name so she chose Becky instead.  Neely is waaay better in my opinion, but alas.  Luckily the next new student I had was in that same class.  I named her Jackie.  She hates it.  Oh well.

On one occasion I had the chance to name a guy I met at a bar because he didn’t have an English name.  So I named him Sal, because I love Salvador Dali and my mother’s father’s name was Salvador and I thought it was a unique name that suited him.  He hated it.

Apparently I’m bad at this.

Anyway, so I have really been wanting to name one boy student “Mick.”  I was talking to Robbie about this and he told me he has been wanting to name a boy student “Raphael.” 

We were out at the bar the other night with one of our boss’s students.  He’s a 23-year-old guy who studies English with May at night and she asked us to go out with him and be his friend.  So about halfway through the night we realized he didn’t have an English name.  I quickly shouted “Mick!” and at the same time Robbie shouted “Raphael!”  Guess which one stuck.  Raphael.  Goddamnit.

Now we've started to come up with really bizarre names to name the kids because they don't know that the names are bizarre.  So far we have a list including Jafar, Oblina (ahh real monsters), Daria, Ursela, Bilbo, you get the idea...

 

Also, a teacher before me named one student Atreyoo from the movie The Never-Ending Story.  No one can pronounce it, and he hates it.  But it's perfect for him because that kid is such a little asshole.

The best is when I walk into class and there is a new student so I get to name him or her and then the rest of the class wants a new name too so they all yell out "Teacher!  Name change-ee!!  Name change-ee!"  Like their names are completely disposable things.  Cracks me up.