Hangman

This is for my close friends. Especially Alex and Dawn.

Ok, so many of you joke about the poor Korean students who will have to put up with my terrible spelling. Luckily, I’m teaching reading so the kids caught a break there. However, when we were finished with testing yesterday I, forgetting my one and only deficiency in life, decided to play hangman.

Furthermore, I did not realize how flippin’ smart my kids are: I started them off with words like ‘tree’, ‘puppy’, and ‘poodle’ but, when it took them less than two letters to guess the word, I uped my game.

I threw ‘transition’, ‘conjunction’, and ‘Justin Timberlake’ at them-they weren’t even phased.

“Fine guys, you are too smart for teacher. You pick a word and whisper it in my ear.”

One of my male students, who I call Indiana Jones because he is always creating and escaping disasters, smiled wryly and beckoned me over.

“Chrysanthemum,” he whispered devilishly.

Come again.

“Chrysanthemum.”

What the fuck?!

Now, if I didn’t have any pride I would have admitted that teacher is not sure of the spelling. However, I have a great deal of hubris, so screw that.

I grabbed a piece of paper, wrote out what I thought was a remote version of the correct spelling, and put the lines on the board to begin the game. I mean, they don’t even have chrysanthemums in Korea!

I love my students to death, but the next time Indiana Jones throws me a curve ball like that, I’m gonna see if he knows how to spell “Parent/Teacher Conference.”

Some of the other words they came up with:

Vacuum, epiphany, translucent, refrigerator, and amphibian.

Which one did I screw up?

Refrigerator.

Sometimes I don’t know how I’ve made it this far.