My students are great (occasionally)
I have a few kids who really stand out w/r/t their awesomeness. I teach 6th and 4th graders, which means that their Western ages are about 11 and 9 respectively, and sometimes they're really great.

My first day observing a class, right when I first got here, one of the students turned around and whispered, "Where did you come from?" "California," I said. "You must be so lonely," she said. I almost burst into tears.

A few weeks ago we were looking at pictures of people eating, and I asked the students to explain what was happening in the picture. A girl was eating a Wonderbread sandwich and looking sad. One of the sixth grade boys said "I think she is too hungry, so she is chewing napkins." It cracked me up for a day and a half.

On Thursday, one of the girls in the sixth grade (I think her name is Chonan, but the Korean names kill me) brought me a lanyard at lunchtime. "You are so beautiful," she said, then took about a minute and a half to come up with "I like you very much."

The kids in my after school class are also awesome. One of my favorites is a third grade girl called Eunjae. Her English is pretty good, but she gets overly emotional about some things and kind of loses her ability to articulate, so she says "Teacher, oooooooooooooaaaaaanh!" and then giggles, which somehow perfectly communicates "You have to help us cheat, or else the sixth graders will beat us again!"

Eunjae sits next to Amy, also a third grader, who spent some time in Canada, so she calls me Miss Chase. On Tuesday I gave them a crossword about whales to do, and Amy said to me perfectly seriously, "Miss Chase, this is my worst nightmare." (I told her to draw a whale on the back instead.)

I also love Hyun-joo. He's a sixth grader, and really sharp, but kind of introverted and weird. We were playing the "Most Extreme" game, where the kids start out with a simple statement and each team has to come up with something more extreme. When it came to Hyun-joo, it was "Today I killed the universe and all the planets with an atomic bomb." Hyun-joo said, "Today I killed the first thing that was in the universe." I said, "Do you mean God?" "No," he said. "The first thing. Before the universe." And I'll be damned if he didn't mean the Prime Mover. What sixth grader can communicate the idea of the Prime Mover, much less not in their native language?

Of course, I also have Creepy Up-Nose Staring Boy, It's Thursday So It Must Be Fistfight Day Boy, the fact that the first graders scream "Foreigner!" and run the other way when they see me, Inappropriate Crying Girl, and the Mystery Pooper, so it's not like I dearly love them all, but still.