The Total Femme

Teaching English to non-English speakers is transcendent and frustrating and I’ve been doing it since college. These days, my students tend to be Korean, thanks to the desire of many middle and upper class families in Korea to have their kids attain fluency in English. One of my current students is a 16-year old girl who is having to repeat 9^th grade in order to accomplish this goal, at a Catholic girls school, no less. She’s living with a friend of her mother’s from college, a family she had never met, out in the suburbs where it’s impossible for her to walk anywhere other than around the neighborhood. I try to bring her a little fun along with helping her with her homework and whatever tedious English work she has to do, by throwing in a lesson on swear words and the like every now and again.

At any rate, this often-frustrated but brave and cheerful student recently reminded me about OTL, something I’d learned from a previous Korean student far from home (and he was only 11). Don’t look at it as letters, look at it as an emotional state: the O is a person’s head, the T is their body and the L is their legs. Get it?

I am completely OTL about my upcoming birthday. It’s that one where afterwards they send you that magazine in the mail. Not that I’m not glad to have made it this far, because I certainly am! It’s just a little daunting, is all. Someone’s happy, though – Tex just pure-d loves that magazine!