::A Geek in Korea::

My mid-level students are studying a story that features codes. The idea of the story is that the characters send messages to each other in codes. The book gives the keys to the codes, and this gets the students involved in the story by finding out the message. To prepare for the lesson, I covered the word "symbol" and gave lots of examples. We went through traffic signals, popular food logos, computer symbols, and basically any other symbols the students might know. Their homework was to find or make ten more signals and give their explanations in English.

One student used his computer to print out road signs. He wrote the Korean and English translations to accompany the pictures. It was extremely well done. Another girl created symbols in her notebook and then labeled them. Some of the students used examples in class, or used suggestions that they had said in class but I didn’t know.One boy, in class, when we had been talking about symbols, had been yelling about the Daejeon Zoo mascot as a symbol. I didn’t know how to draw this, so I left it up for him to explain what he meant.

When I was checking his homework today, he started out with the same symbols as everyone else. He would list the word next to the picture, then write "symbol". His handwriting is terrible. This lead to a sort of spelling feedback loop, where each time he tried to write "symbol" by copying the example above, he would get farther away from the correct spelling. While the first time he had written "Go symbol" correctly, the last symbol on the list said, "Daejeon Zoo Land Sodomy".

This is rather amazing, and disgusting at the same time. Of all the words, and letter combinations he could have come up with, he ended up with something so strange I laughed out loud and went to show my foreign coworker simply to have the evidence that this story was in fact true. Of course I didn’t explain to the students what I found so funny about this particular student’s homework, so they will always wonder what made me have such a reaction.