10 Snippets of international school fun

1) At an international school, you don't give out detentions for fist fights or smoking in the bathrooms, instead you give out detentions for not speaking English at school.

2) We were coming to the end of a fun matching game on the board with vocab words, and I declared we had to stop. To my joy, one 8th grade girl loudly exclaimed, "but this is actually helping!" How rewarding, to know that everything else I've spent hours planning did not help at all.

3) Every week, my students write sentences using each vocab word. This was one of my favorites using the vocab word, vehemently. "The cheeseburger fan vehemently attacked the man who blew up the McDonald's." Gotta love cheeseburgers and 8th graders.

4) Here is what every Language Arts teacher wants to hear:

PJ- "Miss Jones, Miss Jones!"

me- "Yes, PJ?"

PJ- "Is this a runon sentence?"

me- "No, it's ok, but you could use a semicolon here."

PJ- "What? but it's a compound complex! This is a subordinating conjunction!"

oh the joy

5) After a vocabulary quiz, one student passionately declared, "Those questions were so hard! I really had to think!" I'm so glad I could finally make someone really think.

6) I might spend hours laboring (well sorta) over a pretty drawing to decorate the board, to no avail. No shouts of amazement slip from the lips of my adoring middle schoolers. Why? Because most of them are Asian and could draw the same thing, ten times better in five minutes. I should give up on trying to impress them with my meager attempts at art.

7) Not only do my Korean students complete their homework every night, they also have violin or piano lessons, private tutors, Korean school on Saturdays, whatever sport they play, their family's ministry, and parents asking whether they want to be a doctor or a teacher. I could not handle being a Korean middle schooler.

8) For a writing assignment, my students had to rewrite a fairy tale or nursery rhyme in their own words. A hispanic 7th grade girl raised her hand and sincerely asked if rewriting "Love Song" by Taylor Swift would be acceptable. American, Hispanic, country music, fairy tales, Philippines- that's one mixed up cultural experience. And since when does Taylor Swift write fairy tales? Of course, I told her she could.

9) My teacher just got her classroom's 3 bean bags back from getting repaired on Friday. When we came in Monday morning, small, white beads covered half the floor. As the first 8th grader entered the room, we asked, "What happened to the bean bag?" "Well, during Korean school on Saturday, Glory jumped off the table onto it and it broke," tattled one girl with a smile. "Glory was on top of the table? Was there not a teacher here?" "Well, there was a teacher...." she sheepishly replied. I don't think there was much learning going on during that school day.

10) We were studying Greek/Latin roots and were discussing mono, bi, tri, etc. in class. My teacher asked how many of you are bilingual? Over 3/4 of the class raised their hands. How many are trilingual? Almost 1/4 raised their hands. The remaining students were either monolingual or spoke more than 3 languages. These are 12-14 year olds. wow.