tofu

I taught my Tuesday/Thursday classes for the last time today. As expected, I felt not a twinge of sadness about it. I didn't even bother to tell most kids it was the last time they'd see me.


I did tell one class, the highest level class I have. These kids are pretty much fluent in English, their only problems would be that they might have a bit of an accent, or they come across the occasional word they don't know. It really hasn't been my job to teach them, rather it's been to just find things to talk about with them. They're middle schoolers, so the boys have always been smart-asses, which I can relate to.

There used to be about six boys in the class, but that has dwindled down to two. As with all the other classes I've taught, and diametrically opposed to how every other English teacher in Korea does things, I've called them by their real names, rather than some phony English name. However, when I first began teaching them, the boys in this class always wanted me to call this one kid "Tofu".  That was their nickname for him, and I could tell he didn't like it, so I didn't.

You might think that a stupid nickname for a kid would lose steam after a while, but in this case it didn't. All year his friends have, much to his chagrin, called him Tofu. It's also been a running joke in class to bring up the word tofu. For example, I remember several months ago Korea was having parliamentary elections. At one point I asked them if they knew what issues were most important to voters, and one of the smart-ass kids answered, "The price of tofu." It's always been stupid stuff like that, and poor Tofu played along pretty well with it, and eventually kind of embraced it, which was probably the best thing he could've done.

As I mentioned, there are only two boys left in the class; one is Tofu, and the other has always been the ringleader, so to speak, the one seemed to get the most joy out of calling him Tofu. After my last class today, these two kids came up to me.

The ringleader says, "Haven't you always wondered why we call him Tofu?"
"A little bit, I guess," I reply.
"Tofu says that since today is your last day, I can tell you."
I look at Tofu and he nods. "Just remember: it's not true," he says.

The ringleader proceeds to write down a Korean word on a scrap of paper, and instructs me to, when I get home, go to a certain Korean search engine and type the words in. So that's what I just did, and here's what we got: