I've Created a Monster

I am actually a ten-year-old boy.

A couple weeks ago I traded teaching schedules with another teacher. I still teach some of the small kids but now I get to teach elementary school science as well. My students are seven, eight, and ten years old. I found they are much easier for me to teach because I understand them better. Basically, I am the same as them. We all like playing videogames, making stupid fart jokes, and playing soccer after school. I am ten years old at heart.

On the first day of class with the ten-year-olds I won them over by telling them an old scout camp story. It’s the one where my buddy had to get out of our tent in the middle of the night to use the latrine. After doing his business he was making his way back to the tent in the dark but accidentally kicked a large pipe. Turns out this pipe connected the latrine to the sewage tank. Within minutes the entire campsite was flooded with poop water and the whole troop awoke to stinging nostrils at two A.M. Vocab words for class that day were “diarrhea”, “latrine”, and “Paul, what on God’s green Earth is that smell?”

One day I saw some of the kids messing around on the soccer field. It looked like it was the first time they had ever seen a soccer ball, so I decided to go out there and show them some moves. After juking 10 little munchkins out and scoring five times in a row, I noticed they were starting to look at me different. Its like they were realizing that I wasn’t just some guy writing on the whiteboard in class and telling them to sit down. I was a real guy, and I was better than them at soccer. After playing around for a bit I told them about the free-for-all soccer game I used to play every day in fifth grade recess. I started as goalie in the sole goal, I threw the ball out into the field, then whoever scored on me got to be the goalie. Rinse repeat. Infinite replayability, infinite soccer fun.

Well, I didn’t realize it then, but I had created a monster. The next day as soon as the bell rang to signal the end of the day there was a knock on my door. I was just resting in my air-conditioned room when I heard it and I heard little seven-year-old March call out “TEACHER SAM COME PLAY FOOTBALL!” Oh no. March and 10 other boys were waiting for me out on the field to play for another hour in the hot sun. Every day since then the kids come up to me in the halls and ask, “Teacher Sam, you play football today?” I say yes and if I am even a minute late, they come let me know with a bang on my door. It’s been two weeks since after school soccer started and there’s no sign of it ever stopping.

Thailand is great. The kids are cute. We are having fun.