I’ve got a kindergarten class once more, three times a week for fifty minutes. The mothers wait outside, peering in the windows, but I have yet to have one student to see their mothers or cry in my class. We’ve had two classes together so far, but already the class has had some memorable moments. I really enjoy hearing the little comments the kids say to each other in Korean as we work.
Today was the first project we really did where I let the kids handle some coloring and cutting things with scissors. We were making puppets with paper and some taped on chopsticks. The students would then act out the words, "Hello," and "Goodbye" with these puppets, even if they were too shy to talk to me. I showed the students what to do, then set to the task of coloring my own puppets, helping students work, and keeping order, while trying to get the students to learn their new basic vocabulary.
One of the students couldn’t remember the word, "Hello," so he started to scratch his head in a confused manner when I asked him a question. The boy next to him said, "Hey, you look like a monkey!" The boy then started acting like a monkey, making sounds, scratching himself, and doing a decent monkey impression. As the class wore on, the boy would turn to the confused boy and say, "Hey, act like a monkey again!" The boy would comply, and eventually got so into his acting that he fell off his chair.
The boy that asked him to do the impersonation said, "Ah, you must be a five year old boy if you fall off a chair. Us six year old boys don’t find that funny. Am I right?" He looked around the table to see if any other six year old would agree with him. No one else was really paying attention, but the monkey-boy had been stung, and looked for his chance at revenge.
When I got around to helping the students cut things out with their scissors, the "mature six year old" boy was trailing behind due to all of this excess conversation and needed some help so he could finish with the rest of the class. I took his paper and helped him cut out one of the puppets to speed him along. The monkey-boy then looked over at the "mature" boy and said, "Ah, you must be five years old. Us six year old students don’t need help cutting our papers."
Zing!
