::A Geek in Korea::

One of my afternoon classes is a huge group of students from three different classes thrown together. Originally it was going to be two classes better broken up by level, but then some of the students signed up for the morning intensive classes and the "high" level class shrunk too much to justify having it. If you can squeeze all the students in one classroom instead of two, this is what you do in a school like ours. I’m not complaining, because it means that when I usually had a solid schedule in the afternoon, twice a week I get a break instead. However, fifteen students crammed into a class is a bit of a handful if you aren’t on your game.

Since the higher level students have already been moved out of the class, the remaining fifteen have a hard time understanding me at times. Occasionally someone will come up with the right answer, but there are times where I am speaking to a wall. For example, today we were talking about fruits. I tried to explain a grapefruit to students. "It’s like an orange and a lemon, but bigger, and pink on the inside. It’s bitter and citrus, not sweet. Have you seen this?" The students were thrown off by the words "grape" and "fruit". They kept thinking of "grapes" and didn’t know that a "grapefruit" is something completely different. Grapefruits are still not common to see in Korea, so none of my students had seen one before.

I went around asking the students what their favorite fruits were. One of the students said, "A Kiwi". The book we were using called them "Kiwi fruits". I asked them why they would say, "Kiwi fruit". One student, probably the brightest in the class, said, "A Kiwi is also a bird."

"That’s right." I said, "Awesome answer. They are also people from New Zealand. People from New Zealand are sometimes called Kiwis too!"

All my students had this look on their faces like, "What the hell? I ran through the whole "nationality" thing once more, and told students that people from New Zealand refer to themselves as Kiwis. "I’m American, you are Korean, and people from New Zealand are Kiwi."

Then, one of the students turned to another in the back of class and said, "What? You can eat people from New Zealand? They taste like Kiwis?" If any grade school students are responsible for biting a Kiwi English teacher and get in big trouble for it, I’m probably responsible for the rumor that they taste like fruit.

Sorry about that.