Children Are The Future...

Or so the saying goes. And it is going to be one drab, unimaginative and cretinous future if my students are anything to go by. Well that's harsh, some of them are as sharp as a quite sharp thing and some of them are as entertaining as a small child with no background in the entertainment industry can be. But some of them...where to start?

Allow me to introduce you to Olivia and Sophia. Remember that all Korean students have English names for the English teachers to use. Usually these are normal, although it is often down to the quirk of which teacher chose their names, hence why I have taught a Coo Coo the Panda, an Optimus Prime and a kid called Clown.

Evidently the teachers who bestowed these children with names had far more fervent imaginations than Olivia and Sophia. Every class ends with a project, a presentation to me where the kids can show their flair and invention. Olivia and Sophia have been reading a story about a time machine and their project is to produce a presentation about where they would go in a time machine, complete with a poster to show the wonders they saw.

So I sell it to them, like an enthusiastic double glazing pitch. "You have been given a time machine, where will you go? Perhaps back to see Dinosaurs, or maybe a thousand years into the future, imagine what you might find, anything you can think of is fine, write it down, tell me about it".

I leave them to it. Ah there they go, scribbling away, I wonder whether they will delve into the deepest parts of human history or fly boldly into an uncertain future, hundreds or even thousands of years from now. A childs imagination is a joy...

Me: "So guys, what year are you going to travel to?"
Sophia: "2020"
Me: "What?"
Olivia: "2020 teacher, just finish University."

I look at them and realise I'm shaking my head. "This is not a chance to cut out 10 years of being a child, you will still be 13 when you get there, it is to see what the world is like, understand?"

Sophia: "Ahhh...Yes, okay 2050 then."

Genius. They have the adventurous spirit of an agoraphobic.

At this point I should explain that with some of the slightly younger children we play games inbetween the work. Catch a ball, hide a marker pen, all the classics loved by people across the globe.
And the fallback game for any class is Hangman.

One class of twelve loud, little pip-sqeaks loves Hangman and I make them come up one by one to do a word or two from the story we are reading. But they do not play the game by the conventional system. They simply shout out random words from the book. Eventually I get them to try letters unless they are sure they know the answer, but there can be two words up without a letter filled in and it will be incessant shouts of "X,K,Q,P".

So I stop them and explain very very slowly that almost every English word must have a vowel in it. I write the vowels on the board and say "So if a word is there you MUST try one of these, so do not stop trying these letters until the word has at least one. Understand?"

They shout yes. I repeat myself, and ask them to tell me the vowels. They do it. The kid standing by the board has written a hangman of two words and not a letter has been found yet. I remind them that both words must have one of the letters I have on the board and then I say "Okay, carry on".

Pip-squeak 1: "K"
Pip-squeak 2: "Y...no B B B"

Idiots. No wonder you eat fucking dogs, get out of my class.
Suppress the hatred, let the stick man hang by the neck until he is dead. "Dead"...that's two fucking vowels got it?

And then there is my small class of four teenagers, three boys and one girl. In Korea the behaviour of the two can sometimes overlap in a way that back home would be met with raised eyebrows. Boys will hold hands. In fact they will also have pencil cases with Hello Kitty cartoons on and various other "girly" emblems.

I am writing on the board for my fairly disinterested gaggle of teens when one of the boys suddenly shouts "Teacher you very handsome". I stop writing, look at him and say "Erm...thankyou, now carry on with the reading".

Rather than have his peers laugh at him in the good old fashioned, homophobic way that we all know and love, his friends shout agreement and then the chant starts. The hands of one start drumming on the table and the mantra "Handsome, Handsome, Handsome" begins to echo like a highly inappropriate bass line around the room.

Before I have turned full circle to stop him, all 4 of the class are chanting and one of them has hastily scrawled down handsome in big red letters on a piece of paper that he is wildy waving above his bulbous head like some retard at a protest march.

This is a problem. They are being disruptive and I stop them, but what action to take? If I call for a Korean member of staff to discipline them I need to file a report and explain my course of action to a manager.
I can imagine that "Well you see I had to send them down to you as they were calling me handsome. Yes handsome, and last week they told me I had fashionable shoes, it has to stop."

I was going to include a photograph of some of the children, whether the ones in question or the ones I like, but then I realised it could lead to my being identified and then obviously fired. Frankly if I was teaching your children, you'd probably want me fired too, but then again hopefully your children don't have the creative flair and memory of a satsuma.