Bad Teacher?

Kids in Korea are obsessed with death. Not in a bad way necessarily. Here let me give you some examples...

-We're playing card games and if one boy makes the other boy miss his turn he responds with "I kill you"

-A student is absent and I ask "Where is _____". Their response is "He die". Often there is a big elaborate story about how he got hit by a bus and got split in half. Even more often, the child walks in a few minutes later.

-They will tell me endless stories about the video games that they play and the zombies that they kill and the various weapons that they use to do it.

-I ask them to do a writing assignment and by the time the second sentence hits someone has been killed.

Those are just a few examples of course. I think that I got caught between being a child myself and being a teacher... Last week I was teaching just one student and he was going on about a story and kept trying to explain how someone got his head cut off. Finally I thought... "I should teach him the English word for that!", what a fantastic idea. So I teach him the word decapitated.

Yesterday the same student came in to class and asked me what the word was again, so I told him. There were also two more boys in the room this time. I started to get the feeling that perhaps I shouldn't have taught them this word. Then he pulled out his notebook and asked me to spell it, I inquire as to why and he says that he wants to Google images of it. WHAT!? You better believe that his mother would be calling the school immediately.

So here is my dilemma.. technically I taught him an English word, and not necessarily a bad word (at least it wasn't a swear word or even slang) which is my job. Plus we were speaking English the entire time, which is also my job. I'm just sure his mother won't see it this way.

So what did the kid do when I wouldn't tell him how to spell it? ... wrote out how it sounded in Korean and told me he would try to translate the sounds in to English letters when he got home. Just my luck that this kid is pretty smart too....