Dissed by Tiny Gangster!

It's been a busy few days and if you are perched on the edge of your seat wondering what on earth has been going on to classify my days as "busy" then never fear I intend to inform you.
However, I am not going to go into any real detail and so the explanation will probably leave you sorely dissapointed and moving back from the edge of your seat to the more comfortable middle area, maybe even the luxurious back of your seat.

A new term began on Monday. That's my explanation. New classes and new kids.

I was generally delighted to see the back of most of my kids and no doubt they were fairly jubilant at being freed from my idea of education. In fact I was recently shown a British advert aiming to cut CO2 emissions that was withdrawn after huge complaints because it showed a teacher blowing numerous children into bits with the push of a red button if they said they were not interested in some poxy school project to cut CO2.

After watching it, my immediate thought was "I'd love one of those buttons". Half of my kids would already be unidentifiable bloody chunks strewn across the walls.

That said there were quite a few kids who have been great and it's a shame I wont have them around. One of my favourites was of course the star of last weeks blog, the miniature little girl with huge attitude known to me as "Tiny Gangster". I'd long considered Tiny Gangster as good a friend as a small, aggressive child with broken English could ever be. Until our last class together.

It is still painful to drag up these memories but I think I need to open up and move on. It was a Thursday 4pm class like any other. The class idiot (who I renamed Humpty Dumpty) was putting on his usual show of cretinous behaviour to the amusement of a couple of fellow idiots who escaped from whichever village formerly employed them and the teachers pets were waving their homework at me as if they had a winning lottery ticket.

I made my way around this collection of midgets checking their homework and offering feeble reprimands to those who had done nothing. And then I got to Tiny Gangster. She was busy scribbling in a notebook.

Hmmmm...what was this? It could be a hit list of some sort, perhaps she was doing some sums on whether her latest cocaine shipment was well priced. I decided to take it off her and look at it. Big mistake. She shot me a look of cold hatred and sneered at me, but 3 months of seeing her act like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas had hardened me to such visual barbs.

But when I opened the book my self esteem was in tatters. Inside was a fairly good sketch of Justice Teacher. If you have only just started reading, Justice is a friend and co worker who used to have the honour of teaching Tiny Gangster. The caption to this picture read "Justice Teacher, Small Handsome."

Picky little bitch. But whatever, I turned the page, there was another sketch and again it was pretty good, but the caption sent shock waves pulsing through my frame. "Monkey Roberts Teacher, Very Ugly".

WHAT?! Very ugly? I put the book down with trembling hands and walked back to my desk. How long that journey took I couldn't say, I was dazed, confused and terrified of catching a glimpse of my reflection in the computer monitor.
Very ugly? Surely I could have at least qualified for "Distinctly Average"? In fact at that moment I'd have settled for "Moderately Ugly", but VERY UGLY?

Tiny Gangster we were supposed to be friends. But then again, she was the girl who last week told me she wanted to punch her mother in the face for being ugly. I wonder if her mother has also stumbled unwittingly across sketches of herself that have been so cruelly labelled?

As the class ended I needed to consider my options. Plastic surgery is popular and quite cheap here in Korea. If I stopped wasting all of my expendable income on alcohol then I could perhaps save up and sort my Elephant Man face out. But before I made such a rash decision I was given a boost of confidence from one of the older students who is in one of the highest levels.

I briefly taught Anna who some may remember told me it was a scientific fact that men were better drivers than women. I had warmed to her for her healthy realism and now she was to save my shattered ego.

Tiny Teacher (Justices wife) has Anna for her high level listening class. During this class, Tiny informed me that Anna had asked the class if they knew Monkey Roberts Teacher. She then proceded to tell them that I was incredibly handsome and brilliant. Tiny then played a game with the class where they pick a card with an adjective on it and have to choose something that reflects this term.

Anna picked a card with the word refined on it. And in a heartbeat said "Monkey Roberts Teacher". And according to Tiny the conversation went like this...

Tiny: "What? Monkey Roberts Teacher is refined?"

Anna: "Yes teacher, so refined, so handsome and he is the perfect height."

Tiny: "The perfect height? Really? No?"

Anna: "Yes Teacher, the perfect height and so so handsome."

At this point in the story I stopped Tiny and scolded her for playing Devils Advocate with a girl who clearly knew her heights and had a strong sense of what constitutes refinement.

But Anna stuck to her guns and whilst her attempting to hug me in the corridors and telling me that she had a dream about me is about as unnerving and inappropriate as it gets, I do admire her excellent taste. My confidence is back to its best, brimming with arrogance I felt like tracking down Tiny Gangster and giving her a brief talking to...

"Well well well, Tiny Gangster you must be feeling pretty stupid right now. Because Anna says I am perfect and very handsome and as you may note she is the highest level, thus very intelligent...

Need I remind you that you are the lowest level and in the same class as Humpty Dumpty, so I think we can both agree that you are wrong and Anna is right. I'd be pretty embarrassed to show my face around these parts again if I was you, now off you trot and don't kiss your teeth at me."

So with my ego back to form I embarked on my new classes with a fairly positive attitude and have immediately found a group who clearly share my sense of humour.

On Wednesday in a lesson about Regenerative Medicine we had to hear a tale about a 69 year old man who was working on a model aeroplane when his finger got sliced off by the propellor. As the MP3 lecture told us that the old man got too close and had his finger torn off, the class erupted with laughter.

I was delighted. We all found a pensioner being disfigured for playing with toy planes funny. It's going to be a good term.