Yesterday, I walked into my Tigers classroom and started checking my students' homework. Che won - a chubby little 10-year-old who looks like a miniature Korean mob boss thanks to the gold chain around his neck and paunchy, sweaty face - needs to pass by me to get to his seat. Rather than a simple "Excuse me Casey teacher," he throws his whole head into my hip, shoves past, runs to the white board and flops against it for a few seconds before sliding down onto the floor.
All I can do is stare at him with a wordless, mouth-open, "What are you actually doing right now?" expression. Little boys make no sense. My Tigers class demonstrates this on the daily. It's magnified by an unfortunate distribution of 9 rowdy boys to 3 very shy girls. It's really an incredible phenomenon. It's like each little boy has an internal timer of about 10 seconds that goes off if they've spent more than one minute doing normal student behavior. Seriously, it's really amazing that most patriarchal societies have been able to exist for so long. When Young So or Tae Hee suddenly jumps out of his seat, makes a loud fart noise and throws his eraser across the room, I feel the same sense of affinity with the three little girls in the class as I do with my female co-workers when the boss man demonstrates, at an employee get-together, how he can deep-throat a shot glass (yes, that actually happened). All in all teaching is as you would expect for someone new to the game: a complete rollar coaster. Some days the students are great and make my heart happy, and other days, they use their faces as battering rams.
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