Harder Than It Looks

One of the words on the children's vocabulary list was chemical. Chemical--n. a substance. "Who can give me an example of a chemical?" I asked them. Blank stares. “Okay how to illustrate this one,“ I thought, like I do so often these days when explaining something that to a native English speaker is second nature.

I went to the white board with three different colored pens in hand. I began by drawing a simplified periodic table, filling in the first box with an H for Hydrogen and the second with an He for Helium and so fourth, after each box looking back at the kids to see if I was enlightening them. Blank stares.

Do you know what the periodic table is? No? It's a chart listing elements from the lightest to the heaviest. "Has anyone heard of the hydrogen atom?" No, no one had heard of Hydrogen. One boy in the back asked, "Teacher, what is atom?" Oh gosh, "An atom is the smallest bit of matter. Here, let me draw it for you. I turned back to the board and drew a circle inside a circle with rings around it. Turned again. Nothing. I put an "e-" on one of the rings to illustrate the concept of an electron shell. Each time I turned I saw the same horrific glossy eyed stare coming from my students which compelled me to draw anther interesting chemistry model.

After about five minutes of this madness I became aware of my surroundings, that but for the squeaking of my furiously moving pens there was dead silence. I told myself, "Stop, your being paid to teach ENGLISH. It is okay if they don't know chemistry yet, they just hit puberty.” I looked at the board and for a moment was terrified. It could have been taken from the wall and hung in a museum of modern art. I abandoned my effort and repeated to the students again, "a chemical is a substance. Everything we can see and touch, everything in the universe is made out of chemicals. I left it at that and moved on. They half smiled.

After class a Korean staff member came up to me and said one of the students had complained that my vocabulary was too high. I had to laugh. If the staff member had seen what I’d done to the white board, I probably would have been fired.