What Our Kids Did Last Month

Our kids have been pretty hilarious so far and each day we usually have a new story to tell the other teachers. From now on it'll be a weekly blog post! Read some July highlights below.

During my last week at Kindergarten we were learning about sea creatures. My class had to draw what they see in the ocean so naturally some drew sharks, me being eaten by sharks, eels, octopuses and colourful fish. But the best part was one of my students drew me as a mermaid. It was awesome. Later that day, when we were lining up to wash our hands before lunch, the hand holding turned into them biting me and pretending to be "hungry piranhas". Oh, Red class.

In one of Build Up classes, older students around 11/12, I asked who the Prime Minister of Canada was and enthusiastically one of my students raised his hand. I was so excited to see that someone knew the answer so I selected him and he answered, "George Washington!" I couldn't help but laugh along with the class as they continued guessing someone who was not dead or American. Other guesses included: a snowman, maple syrup and Catdog (yes, I taught them that). Great test review day!

One of my younger classes, New Hi, Kids 3!, love to talk about food. Luckily for them our last unit was called "I Like Food!" so they were actively participating in each lesson. Their favourite thing? Purposely saying "chicken" instead of "kitchen".

I'm not sure about Alex but a lot of my kids go absolute bonkers when I spell things not the American way ("colour" vs. "color", etc.). Since the students learn American English they always make fun of me for spelling and saying "zed" instead of "zee". It feels so weird to go against everything I've been taught!

In order to get my kids excited about the new Harry Potter book I've been talking to all of them about it in each class. When I asked one of my girls who their favourite character was they all stared at me in disbelief and said, "well Hermione, duh!" Obviously Hermione! They pronounced her name better than I did when I first started reading the series.

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Around the same time most of the classes we teach were undergoing their monthly unit tests. With each of us having around roughly 60 students each, it's quite a bit of tedious marking on our parts. But, as I was mulling over the written portion of one of my student's tests they answered the question "What do like to do at night time?" with "I like to eat the snake at night." I didn't know whether to be concerned or give them full marks for good sentence structure.

In my Leap High class, we were working on a project in which the students had to write about a city in Korea for people to visit. One of my students looked like he was having difficulty with the assignment and I told him to write about why he was trying to convince tourists to visit his city. He proceeded to write "because Alex Teacher told me to".

I just completed the unit called "I want to go in line skating" with my New Hi Kids class, which dealt with the kids having to use sentences with the verbs want, like, and went to explain daily activities and hobbies. One of the lesson's had the students talking about where they want to go and what they want to do once they're at the location. One of said locations was the bank, and I had to teach them about how you can take money from the bank or give money to the bank (keep in mind these kids are like, beginner level English so I wasn't going to teach them withdraw and deposit). I also taught them that you can "steal money from the bank". Much to my own dismay, the kids incorporate steal into their sentences whenever they can. I can only imagine the look on my directors' face when she overhears the children talking about how they want to rob a bank.

So as you might of guessed, just how people wearing shirts with foreign languages and alphabets is a thing in Canada, it's definitely as much of a thing in Korea. One day, to my surprise, one of my 12 year old students came in wearing a shirt with the word "booze" written across it in bold, underlined font. When I told her what the word meant, she was so embarrassed to be wearing it. But not enough to deter her from wearing it again the following week. According to one of my fellow foreign teachers, two of his students also have the same shirt, and were equally as shocked as mine was when they found out the words meaning.

#slp #slppohang #tesolteacher