Friday, April 26, 2013

Meet Me In The Robby: An Engrish Story


This photo showcases part of our school lobby during last year's English Village. Though we should totally change it to "Engrish" Village after this!

Ah, a 5-day weekend! How fabulous! It's so nice to have extra days to relax and do fun stuff. And to write in the blog while my toddler takes a nap. Perfect! It's nice to just sit on my ass right now, eating Twizzlers (thank you, Genesis, for the American treats) and not having to do any work. I spent my morning scrubbing our home and now, I deserve this rest.

This week, we had our Science Day, which kept us busy. Work was really pleasant for the last 2 weeks because my most horribly-behaved student had gone to Korea. The other children were so much better without him there instigating 1,000 problems a day. But halfway through the week, the little monster returned, complete with a new stupid haircut that makes him look like an evil Peter Pan. We've been finishing our progress reports and getting ready for our Children's Day activity, which will take place next Friday, May 3rd.

For this day, we'll have games, face painting and fun stuff for the kids. My only consolation for this is that in a couple more weeks, it will be Teacher's Day and I have 20 students, all of whom will bring me extremely nice gifts. Last year, I got Dior lipstick, 2 different kinds of perfumes (one of them Channel!), fancy coffee mugs, and all sorts of expensive things. I felt appreciated (and pampered!). So this will be my motivation to smile even through the ear-splitting shrieks of the brightest group of kids I've had to date - but also, the noisiest and worst behaved of all.

Anyway, we had to come up with 4 games for the children to play. That was easy. Christina, my Korean teacher and the Korean director of kindergarten, is so great to work with. Unlike Lesley who made millions of changes and turned everything into a dog and pony show, Christina is easy-going and fun to work with. Within 10 minutes, we'd decided what we'd all do and what each of our roles would be.

Christina worked up an activity plan, which details the happenings of the day: what games we'll play, what time we'll play them and where we will play them, for example. Some of it was in Korean, which although I can read that, I ignored. The morning activity is something the Korean teachers are doing and doesn't concern me, thankfully. My eyes float down to the bottom of the page for the afternoon game activities. And suddenly, they stop abruptly on the following line:
Game 3:
What: Ice cream cone relay
Who: Jennifer
Where: Robby

Now, all this took place within nanoseconds in my brain as I thought to myself, "Robby? Who's Robby? We don't have a Robby."

And suddenly, it dawned on me. Christina meant "Lobby."
And with that I burst into laughter so hard, I could barely breathe. I felt so bad for laughing because I didn't want her to be embarrassed, but I seriously couldn't help it. Poor Christina. She laughed too though I could tell she felt ashamed by it. There's no shame in such perfect Engrish mistakes like that though. It could have been worse. At least she didn't misuse the word "ejaculation."

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