Pióro

Arthur is an English teacher from our sister camp, Camp Korea. Our camp was called Pantech and Curitel, named after the huge telecom company that sponsored the camp. Both camps were based at Howan University, just outside of Gunsan. It turns out that Pantech and Curitel don’t know much about kids. They sent some dude in a suit on the first day of camp to do a presentation for the kiddies, who are all between the ages of nine and fifteen. The suit brought the same powerpoint presentation that he uses for attracting potential investors and ran through the whole thing—1st-quarter projections, graphs, pie-charts and all. He bored the kiddies to fidgets. Still, the kiddies were better behaved than Warren and I. We reverted to the habits we acquired while at nurun: when the boring suit starts talking start making poo-poo jokes that could make us laugh milk through our noses.

Anyway, there’s Arthur. Unlike most teachers, he seemed to have a lot of free-time on his hands. I think he found this time by not planning for his classes, ever. Still, he managed to pull things off. Just before our camp finished, the teachers at Camp-Korea had to e-mail some student evaluations off. These get posted on the Camp Korea web site so the parents (and relatives and rest of the planet) can see how the little ones are progressing. What follows are Arthur’s first drafts of some student evaluations. They are hilarious. The students names are their English ones.

Jeremy

Jeremy writes like a psycho killer. Most children, even the dumb ones, learn at least a few English phrases that they can repeat day after day in their diaries—“I like camp. It was fun. Dinner was yummy.” Yet, every night Jeremy writes the same thing: ‘Pantech and Curitel’ over and over in a script that could only be accomplished if the writer held his pencil between his teeth. And the company’s name is never spelt right to boot. I recommend therapy. The other day, the kids in the class were given treats to share: bags of crisps, candies and such. One box contained lady fingers, or as they are called in Korean, pepero. Jeremy was damned if he was going to share these with anybody so he grabbed a handful, opened his mouth as wide as it could go and jammed his fist full of pepero in. He then used his other hand to ram the chocolate sticks farther down his throat, the whole time managing to laugh maniacally like an evil kung fu master who sees that the hero has fallen into an obvious trap. It was fucking hilarious. This is why Jeremy is my favourite. I also saw him eating paste.

Edward

Edward is the kind of student I dread writing about. There is nothing especially good or bad about him. He is a poster child for mediocrity and will grow up to live an unfulfilling life that even he will fail to take any interest in. Unless he does anything spectacular, he’ll get a B-. Usually, I give his type a B without a second thought, but your son is kind of whiny. He bugs me.

Lucinda

Your daughter is dumb and ugly. Usually I take no notice of these students, but it has come to my attention that your daughter has a crush on me. Most of the time, students with teacher-crushes are fun. I lead them on with little smiles and winks, while avoiding anything that could get changed into a rumour and prison-leading allegations. It’s good for little girls. Sure they’ll cry themselves to sleep for the two weeks following camp for love-sickness, but when they’re older they’ll trade teacher-crush stories with their new university friends. It’ll be fun and they’ll remember me and that time with fondness. But like I said, your daughter is dumb and ugly. This depresses me. They can be one or the other, but not both. I’m doing my best to ignore her.