Well, at least they try hard.

When you're working with a lot of little kids, you have to come up with tricks to keep them under control. I've found that if you have one little routine that you do (and then vary) they'll settle right down. With my main (and youngest) class, it's simple: "Who can be quietest? Who can sit up the straightest?" and then something else for fun like "Who can touch their elbows together?" I go through this every day, often several times a day. The student that does it best gets to go first in the next game or activity.

And damn, they all want to go first, so they sure try hard as soon as the "Who can..." comes out of my mouth. Today, we were playing a game and the class was getting a little unruly.

"Who can be quietest? Who can sit up straightest?" The stables. But then I added the tack on at the end, "Who can smile the best?"

Jun, the one people say could be my nephew, wasn't smiling at all. He was snorting. I chalked it up to little kid craziness and picked someone else.

"But teacher," he said. I'm never Ryan or Mr. Shepherd at school; I'm teacher or Ryan Teacher. "I was smelling the best. None of the other kids were even smelling." Great sniffer, Jun.

That's far from my first little misunderstanding like that. Just a week ago, I was teaching one of my older classes. We were doing an advanced exercise talking about their father's daily routine. The first question I asked was "What does you father do for a living?" which of course they didn't understand. So it became, "What's your father's job?"

Charlie is one of my smartest students, but he likes to play around. I normally call on him first to answer questions just to keep him under control.

"My father..." he paused and was clearly trying to work out how to say it in English. "My father...is a chicken."

"Your father is a chicken?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, confident in his reply now that he got it out.

"Charlie," I slowed it down, "your father--is--a--chicken?"

He understood about the same time that everyone else did. He tried to correct himself over the laughter of the other students, but it was too late. "Charlie has a chicken father" is a common saying in my class now, so common that I had to make a new classroom rule: "No Chicken Talk."

I learned later that Charlie's father owns a local chain of restaurants that sells chicken. Good try, Charlie.

But my first such misunderstanding is still my favorite. This one happened after I had been in Korea for only a few days. I was, oddly, teaching Charlie's class for the first time. We were talking about the senses that day. In my older classes, every session ends with an exercise writing about what we talked about that day. In that class, we were discussing the senses. I spoke, and they transcribed what I said.

"I see with...," and they finished it off. "I smell with..."

Everything seemed to be going fine. They were all listening and writing well. Like at the end of every subsequent writing exercise, they were racing to be the first done. Jack, one of Charlie's close friends, slammed his notebook down on my desk. He had some minor errors in the first few sentences, but nothing major. The last one, however, baffled me.

"I fill my pants."

I had to work backwards, while chuckling, to figure out what he meant. "I feel with my hands," I surmised. It was a good thing that class was about over, because I don't think I could have held it in much longer. I walked out of the classroom shaking my head. I fill my pants? Lucky you, Jack.

Ryan