::A Geek in Korea::

My first class is filled with the lowest of the low for students their age. Some of the children are nearly mute (in Korean and English), while others just have problems with phonics, spelling, or their behavior. The book we use is extremely simple, but for them it poses a respectable challenge.

The book is listening based, which is wonderful for the class, because it means we can listen and speak, instead of being hunched over our notebooks copying things in class. When I assign homework, I make them copy the dialogs into their notebooks. This is how they theoretically should improve their spelling and grammar. Write it down enough and you have some ideas of how English words look.

Since the students don’t have proofreading skills, they often make writing mistakes. If they make mistakes at the beginning of the dialog, when copying it for the first time, it will be in all the later iterations of their work.

One student wrote:

Do you have blue soks?

Ten times. This was a simple mistake, but I had to correct it for her because she didn’t catch her error. These happen fairly often in class.

More rarely, a student writes something entirely wrong that is unintentionally hilarious.
Another student wrote:

I have blue cocks.

I actually laughed so hard out of surprise that I laid my head down on the table. The students had no idea what was so funny, so I just corrected the paper, handed it back, and let them wonder what was wrong with their teacher. I told the student to be more careful from now on.

This is the sort of stuff I have to deal with every day in this class. If it wasn’t so funny, I’d be worried about their poor writing skills much more.