All the kids at my school have Korean and English names, to make it easier for the English teachers. Most of them choose fairly standard names, like Jeff or Clint or Jessica, but a handful think they are poetic or funny and force us to call them something different.
There is “Air” who happens to be a terrible student. At first I thought he was a jerk but now I just think that he doesn’t speak enough English for the level he’s at and his coping mechanism is to act out and talk with his friends. He’s still tough to have in class.
Another more problematic and annoying child is Skywalker, who I teach in a sixth grade class. Skywalker is obnoxious and always has a shit-eating grin on his face like “I’m a troublemaker because I’m a badass and you’re a stupid teacher so I don’t have to pay any attention.”
He’s been insubordinate and distracting and I’ve had to move him around many times. Today was a major showdown, however, as in addition to being a bad influence on the class, when I asked Skywalker to do the assignment, which was matching abcdef to 123456, he smugly stared at me and filled in the letters randomly into the spaces.
“Get out of my class,” I told Skywalker. “You can do the work out of my class and you can’t come back until it’s finished.” He laughed at me and sat there so I grabbed his backback and chucked it out the door. “Out!” I shouted.
That wiped the grin off Skywalker’s face. He got up, ran out the door, and slammed it as loud as he could. Fifteen minutes later, he came in sulking and angry, and passive-agressively showed me his (feeble) attempt at the worksheet. He was not a distraction for the rest of the class.
Today, I was Skywalker’s daddy.
On a less gloating note, today was the first day back from school and it was a mess because we are transitioning to test-prep mode, for English exams at the end of this month and the beginning of next for all middle school kids. I helped my 9L girls prepare for their test today by…playing Scattegories. But they are a good group of students, I told them this was a “treat” because of the holiday, and that it’s back to work on Friday.
Here are some more pictures. There is no theme or order to them, they’ve been taken at various points over the past few weeks. There are more photos to come from the camping trip, but for now, here are some nice pictures of my students, and the school, among other things.
Culture Time 
Why don’t you threaten to cut off little Skywalker’s arm? That should inspire him.
Also love the picture of teh boy with Chan Ho Park .e