Monday, April 12, 2010

Kids Kids

Working with kids has proven to be difficult at some times but I have experienced more good times than bad in the classroom. One thing that I have started doing recently is writing down funny things that they say......some things are even funnier to me, because they are just learning to speak the language, and they tend to come up with unique ways to explain things.... Such as: one of my lower levels were trying to figure out a word, so they ask me. "Teacher, what's the name of that guy? Uh...that big guy? Uh....You know him? That, uhhh....big sky guy?!" ......Have you guessed it yet? Yep, the word they are trying to figure out is God!

But not all of these funny things happen the same way. Sometimes a few students know actual slang words while others don't or they mispronounce something. For example another one of my younger class students were reading aloud and came across the word "tidy," but he pronounced it "titty." One of the other students in the class starts cracking up and I'm trying not to laugh also. But in this case I just told the student how to pronounce the word and we moved on with class. However, in one of my more elite classes we have a 30-40 min. section where the kids work together as a group to work on a project. On this particular day they were supposed to choose a certain kind of job and write the requirements for it and explain why they said that requirement. After I got the projects going I went back to my desk to enter in a few more grades while the kids worked on the project....but I couldn't help but listen in to this one group. Here's the conversation they were having:
Robert: "I think one of the requirements should be- 'After 5 years of marriage"
Jack: "Why?"
Robert: "Because if not married, then they will be chasing girlfriends and never be home. But if just married they will only want to play in the house. So, after 5 years they will not just want to play in the house anymore."
Jack: "What is 'play in the house'?"
Robert: " are too young to know!"
Jack: "But what is it?"
Robert: "Ask Teacher"
Jack: "Teacher...."
Me: (since I had been listening in to this convo, I was already cracking up and I knew what the question was, so I cut him off and just said...) "Ask your parents!"

Not all of the funny things happen in class. Sometimes it is in their homework or on their internet forums that they post online. This week while I was checking the class forums I came across my highest classes forum. The students in this class are very close to being nearly completely fluent in English and many of them could probably go live in an English speaking area and be able to survive easily. So, it is not too often that this class makes mistakes, but sometimes they forget a word and use replacements such as this student who was discussing the forum topic of human cloning. She talked about how she is against cloning. This was one of her reasons why: "If we clone humans we will devalue the meaning of the human life. For example, a mother has a hard time laying the baby, but if we clone the babies, it has no meaning for the mother to do the hard process of laying babies." That day when this student came to class I had to point out to her that chickens lay eggs and humans give birth to babies!

I have to give you just one more reason for why I have so much fun with my students. There are many times where my students ask me what a word means. I try to follow with an easy to understand definition of the word. But sometimes the topics that we get in class bring about words that I find a little difficult to find an appropriate answer for the classroom. During this class the topic was the different types of love. In this class I have only 4 students and they are all 12 Korean yrs....which means that they are 10 and 11 yrs old in America. When the topic of all of the passages is Love then of course the word "mating" has to be of course there is the student to ask the question: "Teacher, what is mating?" I stopped, and I stuttered a little bit and didn't have an immediate answer like I normally do.....But today, one of my other students had the answer. She stood up so proudly and said, " I know what it is, it is the process of eating meat!"

Geeze! I love my kids! They make me laugh a lot!

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