You Are a Fish With Large Fin

You have to be pretty thick skinned to be a teacher in Korea. Everyday we face a barrage of comments about our appearance, personality, teaching style, and anything else the children can think to comment on. For the teachers at our school, this has become something to brag about. The person that received the most horrendous or hilarious comment earns the most laughs from the rest of the group.

Today I put my hair in a pony tail. As I did this I thought about how it would cause quite a lot of discussion from my students. Any tiny change will cause a major reaction from them. But I had no choice. My hair was doing a very good impression of a wild lion's mane.....so I knew a pony tail would receive less attention...or at least I hoped. I walked into my first class and they burst into a giant "Whoah!!!!! Teacher!!!! Wahhhh!! What you do???". A major overreaction...but this is the case every time I do anything different, no matter how small, and no matter the age of the students. Just today I heard the following:

You are a fish with large fin.
At least you look cleaner.
Your eyes are stuck out.
Your boyfriend looks like a pencil.
Are those your real eyelashes?
Why you wear a fat shirt?


And in the past month I have heard:

You are old like grandma.
You should have diet resolution.
Your hair is very cutie but too many.
Your nose is like pig. I call you pig teacher.

I have spent a lot of time trying to explain that if you don't have anything nice to say then you should not say anything at all. Apparently they do not agree. A few weeks ago, two 11 year old boys were talking away in Korean in my class. One boy used his fingers to hold his eyes wide open and said something in Korean, followed by "put your hands on your head". I knew straight away they were imitating me. It made me laugh.

My favourite comment was received by a coworker. He had a student who actually used the dictionary to come up with good insults to say during class. One day the boy looked at him and said "You are a tree fern".