Friday, May 02, 2008

t-shirts and teaching

I tried to explain to the cute young guy who works in the vice-principal's office why his "I love my hooker" t-shirt both shocked me and made me laugh, but I wasn't able to explain it in either Korean or English ("hooker" wasn't on long list of occupations I was supposed to memorize at Ewha - THAT I probably would have remembered) and I just wasn't willing to use interpretive dance for that one.

Also, I like the younger kids, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly. They cry. They cry when they get answers wrong, they cry when they get answers right and someone makes fun of them for it, they cry when you move them because they made someone cry. I think part of it is because it is a special day for them, so there is just a lot more excitement about coming to my class. Or, you know, they just tend to cry.

One of the things that is really great is that even though my newest co-teacher speaks next to no English at all, she really will be an awesome teacher once she gets her own full-time classroom. She engages the kids who have trouble keeping up and the kids with special needs, she adds a lot of ideas to the textbook boring-ness, she is great with the cry-ers, and she has no problem coming down like stack of bricks on the 6th graders when they are being annoying. SHE GAVE A DIAGNOSTIC. Awesome.

2 comments:

Ms Parker said...

It's amazing, eh? I've never had such a gang of crying children in my life... I did my practicum in an elementary school in Canada and those kids would have swallowed live eels before crying in public... go figure.

By the time they hit high school, though, all the tears are gone...

Jen @ Light Enough to Travel said...

Was the "I love my hooker" message on a scroll through a big red cupid heart? In cursive?

One of my students wore that same shirt last year, and she was perhaps the smallest, cutest, (slowest) and most naive student I had. Her name was even Han-byeol (one star)... how perfectly unexpected that she should love her hooker. Awww.