The students I worked with always blew my mind with how they shared camaraderie, riffed off each other’s jokes, and encouraged each other’s competitive best. They were extremely bright, wonderfully witty, and, best of all, ridiculously hilarious.
Work hard and play harder was their unspoken motto.
I was incredibly lucky with a teaching position at a high-achieving private boarding high school. It was a feeder school to the SKY universities – basically the Harvard, Princeton, and Yale equivalents in Korea. In a nutshell, my students were some of the best and the brightest in the country.
Learning how to speak conversationally in a different language was anything but easy. Acing vocabulary tests and memorizing grammar forms was one thing, but putting them all together out loud was another. Each student had varying levels of comfort with speaking English, so I had to find creative ways to get an entire class on the same page.
Because they had dawn-until-dusk rigorous class hours, they were accustomed to – as I soon realized – previous native English teachers showing English-language music video clips and facilitating easy, playful games that required minimal spoken words and phrases. My approach to teaching conversational English was, as I understood, not typical of how they were used to learning it.
After the initial adjustment period, we eventually got to the point of playing competitive group games that piqued their college prep interests.
“Morpheme Basketball” was one of our favorite games to play. It included a list of morphemes (which I knew went hand-in-hand with their vocabulary words), and their meanings and (the best part) playing both sides of the room against each other.
The goal was simple: Be the first to correctly identify the meaning then shoot the ball into the basket for points. In our case, the ball was a soft, green plushie toy that we named Softy and the basket was a plastic trash bin.
How their eyes lit up when I told them that as long as they knew morphemes and their meanings, they could decipher the meaning of just about any unfamiliar word! Perfect for their upcoming vocabulary tests and future college entrance exam! (wink, wink)
Teams sent their next players to go head-to-head and correctly name the morpheme definition. The right answer afforded an opportunity to shoot, from either the 50-, 100-, or 1000- point line, Softy into the bin.
One class, in particular, greatly enjoyed this game. You could say it was a boys class comprised of geeks and jocks. Each side sent its resident geek representative. One offered the student whom they gleefully called Stephen Hawking.
And, my goodness, that child made me think that he could be a teenage Korean Stephen Hawking, pre-ALS.
Sure enough, teenage Korean Stephen Hawking correctly identified the morpheme and positioned himself at the 50-point line to toss Softy into the bin. His teammates loudly insisted and pointed that he shoot from the 1000-point line which was at the very back of the classroom.
Oh, they were ready to be entertained.
Quietly, he walked to the back of the room. As the rest of the boys laughed and joked, he drained the shot from the 1000-point line. Immediately, all the students jumped to their feet, cheered, and ran to young Korean Stephen Hawking.
I didn’t hear them call him Stephen Hawking after that.
Reflections Told 