Mr 20 Percent

Teaching summer school is the easiest job I have ever had. But it just got harder by 20%. The class roll increased from five students to six.

Today a new student joined us. His name is Joo (pronounced Jew) and he is a very nice Korean boy. I know him, and when I saw that he was missing last week, I guessed that he was in Korea visiting relatives for a week. But he didn’t show up yesterday, so I told the boss, who called his mother, who thought he had been attending summer school from the beginning!

So we dragged him in. Poor kid, he was tired of school and felt like summer should be a holiday. But his mother wants him to study mathematics. That’s why Korean men are the hardest working humans on the planet (according to forbes.com) --because of their mothers!

Joo is a smart boy who seems to like math and I quite like him. He is doing his best to break the stereotype that Koreans are hard-working, but once in class he was focused, responsive, and polite. Still, he needed to call his mother to confirm that he was in class, not skipping. He called her and she wanted to speak with me. I spoke to her. She spoke to me, too—in Thai, with a Korean accent.

Finally, at lunchtime, I cornered Joo and asked him, “where were you?” He had missed six days of class, plus an hour.

He responded, “my maid forgot to wake me up.”