Wednesday, March 3, 2010

An Unsolved Mystery

For some reason my students are always asking me about my age. A day doesn't go by without hearing the phase, "Teachaaa, how old?!", and my response is always the same, "How old do you think I am?" Their responses are always a little different ranging from extremely young (16 to 18) to really old (35 to 42*). Last week was the end of winter term so with a little extra time in class we started playing the "guess the teacher's age" game. I made the mistake and said if they guessed it, I would tell them. English may be their second language, but they are definitely smart. They started at one and named every number until the time class ended. I, of course, denied every number. Then I confessed and said "Ok, I'll tell you"... their faces lit up until I said my answer... "I'm 101." I excused them for the day hoping the next day they would forget about the unsolved mystery of how old I am.

The next day rolled around and of course they didn't forget. During class they were filling out these packets so I said I'd give them a clue to my age for every page they completed.
Clue #1- It's between 1 and 100
Clue #2- I gave them this HUGE math equation (which I actually figured out) to find out my age. Like I said, they're pretty smart so they all wrote down the equation and told me they'd have their parents figure it out (uh, oh) I haven't had any guesses yet...
Clue #3- The sum of my age is an odd number

After a few clues, I said, "Ok, ok, I'll tell you for real this time. I'm... seven."
Xavier said, "You're not seven! I'm seven! and you're tall and have big feet!"
I was actually quite flattered he called me tall and I suppose my size six feet are considered big in Korea.
Then another student, Lily, stood up at her desk, stomped her feet to the front of the class, stood next to me and said, "You're not seven, you have thoooseee...!" You can assume what she was pointing to while she said that and I had a permanent stomachache the rest of the day from laughing so hard.

My age is still an unsolved mystery and it will remain that way.

*I'm not saying that's really old (ha)

No comments:

Post a Comment