Albert and Alberto

I have this one kid named Albert in one of my classes. He’s a great student – he always does his homework, he’s pretty smart, and he’s really funny. He can sometimes be a bit of a punk, but to me this is not really a bad thing.

From time to time he’ll come up with some funny idea, like the time when he tried to memorize pi to 100 places, or another time when he made a full page list of impossibly silly Korean names (for example 꽦쀍쿜). When he showed it to me, he and I just about laughed ours heads off.

Albert is a regular grade school boy at heart -- he remains fixated on this one book we did a while back – Gross Body Facts. His favorite subject was, and remains, chunky vomit. What I say about that, though? I remember some of the stuff I came up with in grade school, and it’s really not much different.

Out of all the students at CDI, I've had him a surprising number of times. I had him in my Spring 2007 English Chip 4 class (my first term at CDI), then again in Fall 2007 in Memory English Giga. Now it’s Spring 2008 and he’s in my Memory English Tera class.

One day I was telling him about former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. That day we had a few minutes of free time at the end of class, so I pulled up a YouTube montage of his "I don't recall" Senate testimony. The video shows his 70+ repetitions of the phrase.

Of course, the students didn't know what the whole thing was about, but they did understand the idea of a 모르쇠 (mo-reu-swe) -- a guy who who pretends to not know anything so as to avoid trouble (typically in a corruption case). [Source]


When the kids saw the video, they thought it was absolutely hilarious. Of course, now I have the problem of kids writing in "I don't recall" on their vocabulary tests, but it was worth it.

Albert, on the other hand, had this to say about the guy who ruined his name:

So to Mr. Gonzales, who may be lameting his demise in Washington, I have this comfort:

Worry not, for your name and deeds will forever be etched onto the minds and memories of my English students here in Korea. My student Albert, of course, will always recall you.