The Name Game.

Part of what makes ESL education bearable is when you have students who are not insufferable zombies.

Before you chastise me, I’m totally fine admitting I’m a mediocre-to-pretty-bad teacher. So, I’ve decided the best approach is to grin, bear it, and talk with the kids like I’d talk to any other kid who seems half-human. It’s been working wonders for my mood. The best example of this is an all-male middle school class I teach.

Now, backtrack with me for a bit, to the first week of December. At the time, the boys had nicknamed themselves Alex, Ben, Dummy, and Monkey Man. This was permitted to stand.

In the spirit of the season . . .

First, Monkey Man became Rudolph, as in the famous reindeer. Then Alex, Dummy and Ben became Sled, Santa, and Present, respectively. This was plenty surreal, even for my taste.

Then, shortly afterwards, we acquired another student. Okay, by “shortly,” I mean “Mid-January.”  I was anxiously hoping that the novelty of the Christmas names would wear off, and some relatively traditional English names would stick. Hell, I’d like them to start going by their Korean names. But that’s a very different discussion. Probably the same discussion that would ruminate on the affinity between the name “Cindy” and fatness among South Korean youth.

Anyway, the Christmas names weren’t going anywhere. We picked up a new student. Somehow, this student was informed that he needed a Christmas-themed name if he was to be a part of the class. I blame Rudolph, who is probably the brightest kid in the class, and the laziest. You know the deal.

So, hoping to avoid the weirdness of “Present” and “Sled,” I ran down the list of Christmas Folklore characters. After Frosty, all parties present at the nativity, Herod, all 8 reindeer besides Rudolph . . . the class claimed that the new boy’s name literally meant “Comet” in Korean. I don’t believe this for one minute, but they seem to think they need to justify giving him a weird name. I seriously don’t give a shit. I hate the practice of giving kids English names in general, and making them ridiculous at least makes me amused while I feel I am destroying their cultural heritage, and my capacity to say Korean words is questioned.

When I first met them, they were comically bad at doing exercises in the books we use. Awful. One day, they were screwing around so much I just gave them the whole thing for homework and told them, rather calmly, I would toss them out of the 7th story window behind me, so help me God, if they got one wrong.

The entire class got 2 wrong. Since then,  things have been better. It snowed today, and rather than play some mind-numbing game that entails speaking English for the sake of speaking English, we went outside and had a snowball fight. I shoved a huge wad of snow down Rudolph’s collar. He squealed like a little girl. The class then assaulted me with snowballs for a good 5 minutes. I finally repulsed the attack, and we went back into the building. It was nice.