KK in the Classroom

Koreans love to chant. A chant is halfway between regular speech and a song. A chant is to a song what an acrostic is to a poem. What a greeting card is to prose. What nails on a chalk board is to my ears. These are the lyrics to one such chant:

Wah do warry warry wah wah wah
Wah do warry warry wah wah wah
Where is my bat? It's in the box.
Where is my bat? It's in the box.
Oh thanks Mom.

For the record, 'wah do warry' doesn't mean anything in English or Korean, which is great if the lesson was on gutteral noises but it wasn't. My co-teacher then had the students re-write the lyrics to spice things up a bit. By and large it was pretty standard: where is my pencil? It's on my desk. Where is my desk? It's in the classroom....there is very little by way of creativity here. Then I went up to one group of boys and asked them to read me their lyrics. "Oh no teacher, too dirty!" Okay, now I really want to hear it. This is what they came up with:

"Where is my poo? It's in the father's mouth."

Awesome.

I was also tasked with another film this week. The subject was 'When's Your Birthday?' and the general plot of my script was kid A asks kid B when their birthday is, kid B says it's today, kid A obviously forgot, oopsies, gives a makeshift gift, everyone laughs. Right? Nooooo. The kids are reading it flatter than their pre-puberty chests. So I ask my teacher, "Do they understand that it's a joke, or is it not funny to forget someone's birthday in Korea?" To which she replies, "Oh, a joke. Like, they're only pretending to forget the birthday?" Sigh. After much coaching, this is the result: