::A Geek in Korea::

Today was a non-stop testing day for me. All my classes finished their materials for the month and needed to be tested to see if they retained anything from their month of study. (Results: inconclusive.) My day was an endless grind of preparing material between classes, photocopying, instructions, and then sitting in silence. I’d grade papers when they finished in class, record the grades, then starting over for the next hour.

Perhaps because of tomorrow’s national holiday, or the start of a new school year, or the realization that students had only a day or two at most with their current classmates left, I had all sorts of discipline problems today. It might have been because of a paperwork mistake that revealed to the students what classes they would be in next session. They already knew if they had advanced or not, so the tests were of no consequence to them.

It stated off in a class where I had prepared a test that closely followed the homework I had assigned the previous class. When I came to class, no one had done their work. They all looked surprised when I was upset. Since they hadn’t prepared their work, the test was much more difficult. The answers I got as a result on the test were either borderline acceptable, or absolute nonsense. I also had to keep the students from telling each other the answers.

My coworker had complained about one of the groups of students I taught in another hour of class. He told me about how glad he was that I was teaching the students I had in my next class because they had given him a lot of problems. They weren’t exactly my favorite students either, but it was like he had predicted the future. Every complaint he made about them came true in the next class.

When I went to split the class up to prevent copying (students call it "Cunning"), the girls in the class refused to move. I wouldn’t start the class until they moved, so they wasted more and more time arguing with me. Because of this, I didn’t have enough time to help them cover some of the material they needed for the test. Thus, their attitudes hurt everyone in the class. Eventually they erected an elaborate book barrier to keep themselves seated next to each other while preventing copying of each other’s papers.

The next problem was a boy that is just really, really strange. I kept having to bring him back to the land of the living. He’ll just open his mouth and stare. His long ears amplify the creepiness. He looks like a fish that lacks oxygen to keep swimming and is just about to start floating. You could throw a pencil from across the room and it’d block his windpipe. There just isn’t anything going on. This fish-boy was so out of it today that the easy confidence boosting questions I put on the tests were beyond him.

When I got his test back, not only had he answered all of the questions incorrectly, but had written a rude Korean word for an answer to the questions he didn’t know. I got one of the Korean teachers to yell at him for me. After further examining his test, I found something that might have explained his brain dead appearance.

"What do you like to order at restaurants?"

His answer: "Soap."

That might explain it.