Jewel Of the School

Koreans love their ceremonies and the new school year has been full of them. Today we had an hour long meeting to greet the parents who represent each class in the "PTA". All gatherings at school start with the National Anthem and then move on to the principal taking the stage where he loves to ramble on and on and on.

Normally I can only follow 40 percent of what he says but now that I have a partner teacher she sat next to me and translated. I wish she hadn't. At one point he segued into talking about the English program and my name (Mr. Cam) peppered the rant. Near the end of this particular trail in his talk, all the parents heads rounded onto looking at me with giant smiles that frightened me. When they finally had a long enough look I learnt he'd said I was the jewel of the school. (It's OK, that vomit in your mouth is natural. It happened to me too.)

I do like the principal and from stories I've heard of other authoritarian principals, I know I have it very good. I do my job well, we have lots of fun in class and the kids are (slowly) improving. These are the basic qualities a teacher should try to live up to. I was just thrown by this compliment because of the timing. Overly nice compliments like this shouldn't come about on a day where I've laid into one whole class for being needlessly noisy and then threw a couple of kids from another class out in the hall for acting sassy. Oops.