Korean Job Discussion Forums

[TOGirl]

I teach Kindergarten (I have only been there for one month) and have a class of 6 year olds.

Today we were reviewing boy and girl and I was asking hands up boys and hands up girls.

Two students put their hands up for boys and I said no silly, your girls....wrong. The Korean teacher looked at me with a horrified glare and said oh no, they are boys.

One "boy" has a longish bowl cut and very feminine features and his name is "JOY".

The other has shoulder length permed hair and again feminine features. His name is "Trent" but I thought this was a case of a boy name being used by mistake...as often happens.

I apologized to the Korean teacher and since the kids are young they won't remember that I thought they were girls.

Has anyone else had an experience like this. While these things do happen I did feel quite embarassed to have mistaken these two for girls. This Korean teacher is already a bit wary of me, I'm sure today's little incident only made things worse....oops.

[laogaiguk]

Same thing has happened to me a couple of times. Both times I was embarassed but just went on like nothing happened

[Zyzyfer]

I thought one female student was male at my last job. Didn't say anything, but asked another student. Of course, word got around that I didn't know.

Turned out that she was gay in the end, anyway. Very interesting.

[schwa]

First week I was here my hagwon assigned me a class of middleschoolers, 7 or 8 of them, a free-talking class. They were great -- active & talkative. I took them all to be boys, with similar short haircuts & uniforms & me with no clue about Korean names. So I commented, "Hey, all my other classes are mixed, but not this one." Awkward silence. One student turned bright red.

Poor Bit-na. Bless her though, she forgave me, & took thereafter to always wearing some kind of girly accessories.

(Brilliant kid. She moved to Canada a while later, on her own, & went on to do well in mainstream highschool there.)

[tomato]

At one kindergarten where I worked, a child who was richly endowed with curly tresses had a nametag with the name Caspar.
I told the regular teachers, "Caspar�� ���� �̸��Դϴ�."
("Caspar is a boy's name.")
The teacher said, "���ڿ�."
("He is a boy.")

The subject never came up again.

[JacktheCat]

[TOGirl]

Ok, well I'm glad I'm not alone in this.

I did just move on like it didn't happen but am thinking really we need to change that poor kids name from Joy to something a bit more manly, maybe I will suggest Joe instead.

[JacktheCat]