Knock on Blessed Wood with Your Fingers Crossed

I go back and forth on whether or not I’m a good teacher pretty much on a daily basis. It’s not that I think I’m a bad teacher, but when it comes to explaining the past participle preterit perfect, or any of the other finer points of the English language, I have found myself ending lectures with, “You know. It just sounds right. Right?” Which is normally when I’ll do something goofy to make the kids laugh and forget they were asking me what exactly a prepositional phrase is and why you can’t end sentences with them. (You can’t?) At the end of the day, I side with the school’s logic that whatever my faults when it comes to the technicalities of grammar, the kids are better off learning English from a native speaker so they are exposed to both the language and the culture; and trust me, if you dropped any of my kids off on the streets of New York tomorrow, they’d do pretty well for themselves.

But every once in a while I find myself having to articulate cultural norms or rituals that when enunciated, sound inescapably bizarre.

Last week, in the middle of explaining the vocab word “cast,” I decided to delve into multiple meanings, one of which being what doctors put on someone when they break a bone. Cast. Which in turn sparked a wider conversation on who has and hasn’t broken bones, ending with the kids asking which bones I’ve broken.

      Me: I haven’t broken any, yet. Knock on wood.

Rapping quickly on my desk, I looked up to find ten confused faces staring back at me. Slowly, every student in the class started knocking on their desks and looking at me, puzzled. I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to explain that knocking on wood signifies good luck and why knocking on metal or concrete just wasn’t the same. But how many knocks, Teacher? And how hard? And what if there’s no wood?

Or

As I teach middle school kids who have pretty much been at school every day since they were born, it seems that in any given class, half the students are sick. Coughing. Wheezing. And sneezing. Which is probably why I spent the first three weeks battling every bug the kids tossed my way. The only thing is in Korea when a person sneezes, there is no custom to say anything directly afterwards. Everyone just goes about their business like nothing happened.

Now, I’ve always thought “God bless you” or even the tamer “bless you” was ridiculous – who am I to bestow a blessing? And just because you sneezed? On the subway? Really? But it wasn’t until I moved here that I realized how deeply ingrained the reflex had become. I spent the first week or so blessing any unsuspecting Korean with allergies that sneezed within earshot – until my kids reminded me that A.) it’s weird and B.) no one understands what I’m saying anyway. So now every time a kid sneezes I have to physically restrain myself from imparting God’s love. Fine, heathens, have it your way.

Or

 My kids have their big exams coming up, and tonight while reassuring them that they’ll all do fine, I told them that I would keep my fingers crossed for them regardless. They immediately demanded to know which fingers I was crossing and why. And what does crossing mean, Teacher?

The lesson I concluded with? We are all weird.