One of my kindergarten students says the cutest, most hilarious things--but a lot of the cuteness comes from her dire seriousness and the drastic expressions on her face.
The kids here often rat each other out, and because they aren't so hot at English yet, when they want to accuse someone of saying something bad/wrong/in Korean, often they'll say "is" instead of "says," using this construction: "Teacher! So-and-so is ahjussi!" (Alerting us to the fact that so-and-so called somebody an old man in Korean, in this case.)
One day this particular student looked at me with her brow furrowed deeply and her eyes all beadified, like she was about to tell me about the most dastardly deed anyone ever could have possibly committed. And she said, her voice dark, low, and heavy with the gravity of what she was about to say, "Teacher, Dennis is...chopsticks!"
I have no idea why it was a crime for her classmate to say "chopsticks," but I couldn't stop laughing for almost the whole lunch because she said it as if he must be worse than Hitler.
Other famous quotes from the same girl include a sentence she volunteered this week that was shockingly correct grammatically: "My mother is a clock!" It was far superior to her classmates' all-too-often-used constructions like "I am dragon!" or "Jesse house baby!"...but, having seen her mother regularly for sometime now, I have to say I fail to see the resemblance between her mother and a clock.
Another gem from this student came yesterday when she showed me a red bump on her arm. The children often like to show off their scars and boo-boos to receive their token air-kiss, but this one didn't look like a cut or scrape to me. "Did a mosquito bite you?" I asked.
She looked at me, her eyes welling with concern. "Bee is coming," she said.
For the next few hours during class she would periodically interrupt me to squeeze her arm, look up at me like she were anguished, and say in an anxious tone, "Teacher, bee is coming..."
Yes. Yes, it is. And it knows if you've been naughty or nice...so be good for goodness' sake!
