Two days after Wendy attended my class, I attended Wendy’s English class; it was the loud sixth grade class I constantly have to reprimand but they all clapped and cheered when Wendy called me up to clarify some pronunciation. “Thank you, thank you.” I bowed. Wendy had an interesting reading tactic: she made three columns on the white board. Each student had a magnetic white board tile. If they didn’t know how to pronounce a word, they wrote the word on that tile and stuck it in column one. Words they didn’t understand went in column two. If they had no questions, they wrote their name and stuck the tile…

Wendy attended a special training for Korean co-teachers last week and came back with a worry. “We have to do an open class together but we don’t actually teach together,” she started. As you know by now, my main school is so big that I rotate to every homeroom and teach English to 20 separate classes every week. Legally my title is “assistant” so I’m supposed to be accompanied by either a co-teacher, or if that’s not possible, the homeroom teacher is supposed to be my co-teacher (I’m laughing). “The trainer said that our case is the worst case,” she went on, and I had to wonder why the trainer…

For the months of the year lesson, I have a particular set up. After our usual warmup, the kids watch a catchy video and sing along. Then, we write each month one by one. I on the board and the students in their notebooks. I ask students who has a birthday in each month and then write their names in Korean. They get a huge kick out of it, and get more excited as class goes on. Some classes try to prank me and the student in question by shouting out wrong spelling. Other students get louder and louder if I can’t understand them through their masks and the general…

“Excuse me,” called a chipper voice. Wendy leaned around the partition and said, “I need to talk to you.” I know this is just her style, but every time she says that my heart stops. “I have two things to tell you. First, I ran into the fourth grade teacher because we live in the same apartment. She wanted to explain that snacks are hard biscuits in Korean.” Last week, I had talked about the meaning of “snacks” with the kids while the homeroom teacher squinted at me from the back. It’s not breakfast, lunch, or dinner but the small food you eat between meals. “So is pork soup a…

Sometime in the afternoon Wendy appeared over my computer. “Don’t get me wrong, I like you,” she started and my heart dropped all the way into my stomach. What had I done? I put on my self-protecting “customer service” face to prepare for whatever was going to come after this sentence. “I want to put a partition between our desks. Don’t take it the wrong way,” she emphasized, “I like your questions about Korean!” My immediate reaction was relief that I hadn’t irrevocably committed a terrible faux pas and was being chided, but my neck still felt hot. “Okay.” I said. “No problem.” “Well, can you come with me?” She…

Yesterday I returned to the salon a friend had suggested, only for the woman who cut my hair last time to be absent. Another women with eerily similar stylings cut my hair a bit… shorter than expected. I’m verging on rich tennis mom territory. That’s partly on me, and that’s partly a usual complaint from other friends that Korean stylists are scissor happy. But I’m someone who’s nearly shaved her head before so short hair isn’t too bad of a shocker considering I spent a month once looking like a dandelion. The fourth graders didn’t catch my haircut but the fifth graders certainly did. One tall girl talked over the…