I just walked out of my first final class.
For the first forty minutes of class, we played a game called forty nouns.* The students really enjoyed it, and we finished the game with ten minutes left.
Then came the confession.
I told them that I am leaving on Friday to go back to America. They cried out boos and dour moans that needless to say flattered me. Some gawked at the news, both stunned and dismayed.
I asked them who thought I could speak Korean. Nonplussed faces and a scent of intrigue blossomed, as a few hands rose timorously. Those who had stood witnessed raised their hands in testimony, quipping to others that they really had seen me speak Korean. The number, however, was curiously small.
Students began testing the waters, shouting to me in Korean cajoling me to submit to that which I had forsaken. Before me were some of my favorite second grade students, those with whom I had begun, and those with whom, poetically, I would end. Their eyes implored something to hold on to, anything to wrap their eager minds around. Anticipation electrified the room, energizing every nook and cranny and desk mark and shirts and windows as if these things would all unite in a blinding explosion. My heart had begun revving up last night, and had now come to a fever pitch as it pounded mercilessly, savagely. I had been waiting, imagining this moment for months, and now that it had come, and an ineluctable silence stared at me. In a room suffused with propane littered with active C4s, I lit the match.
"나도--" (
I, too--)
"Bat Shi* Insane" might be apt.
I had spoken only two syllables, but they smelled it immediately. I had unleashed a predator into a den of puerile monkeys. They pounded on desks, cried out like crazed chimps, shouted the lord's name in vain, jolted out of their seats, ripped paper (I'm not exaggerating) , climbed over and on top of each other and hit their heads on their desks. Some simply sat there stunned and stupefied, frozen as if someone had injected liquid nitrogen into their veins. Some looked back in consternation, a latent odium toward the man who had ostensibly deceived them for an entire year. They simply could not believe that this foreigner, this man from strange lands with alien customs and wayward ideals, had begun speaking their native language, the words of their mother tongue. And for what it's worth, he spoke it reasonably well too! I collapsed under the podium in embarrassment and laughter.
The pandemonium vanished as quickly as it had spawned, quickly overcome by another quiescence. A pin drop could have torn asunder the fragile silence that held the cosmos together.
I finished my sentence:
"나도 답답햇어~" (
I, too, had been waiting.)
Again, a blinding explosion of joy, dismay, surprise, shock, relief, stupefaction.
I began speaking to them in Korean, first addressing this truth I had been keeping from them. I told them the reasons, then proceeded to share with them my impressions and what I had derived from my time with them. I thanked them and asked them to try to stay in touch and welcome the new conversational English teacher with respect.
I had not realized how readily I had subsumed my teacher's persona, but I did not tear up as much as I imagined I would. I had been fearing how difficult this week might be, but I think the professionalism I had adopted in the classroom--not to mention the unique teacher-student dynamic consecrated in this society--occluded my emotions from overwhelming me.
Then again, maybe it's also because I have to do this for nineteen more classes.
That said, I was a nervous wreck. A heat burned within and my face felt hot, as if a spotlight had been turned on too brightly and for too long.
Then to not only see the alacrity beaming from my students' eyes, but also
hear them speak to me in Korean, with joy, with elation, all tinged in a chroma of bittersweet, only bolstered my love for them and reassured me that my time with them might have been worth something to them after all.
As I spoke though, I noticed one of my favorite students hold back tears. His lips postured wry and his nose reddened. A different student pointed this out, and a few others chuckled at this, not out of malice clearly, but maybe instead from discomfort, or even, sympathy.
I looked at him, and smiled the warmest smile I could.
He alone could have shown me that my efforts this year had not been in vain. What fortune, though, that he was in fact not alone, but with seven hundred others who graced me with their smiles and love.
I told them they made me a better teacher and a better human being, and that I cannot thank them enough.
To close, I shared with them a quotation a friend of mine shared with me that morning:
"Do not cry because it is over. Smile because it happened." -Dr. Seuss
As I opened the door, a din of goodbyes and "I love you"s trailed in my wake. I walked out that classroom for the last time with a warmth I had never known.
