Romeo, Juliet, and the Koreans
The kids are reading Romeo and Juliet. So my student teacher is fishing for the answer “dramatic irony”. She asks, “What do you call this, when Juliet is speaking on the balcony, and she doesn’t know Romeo is down below listening?’
To which Marshay responds, “Stalking.”
And then yesterday as I’m walking out of the building with my buddy, Jim Midlord, our vice-principal, a real dingbat given to truly incomprehensible statements — I really mean that — says, “Mr. Midlord, when they show-up, you’ll be in charge of the Koreans.” No context. No explanation. No background. Just “you’ll be in charge of the Koreans.”
To which Midlord just responds, “OK” and walks on.
He thinks she’ll just forget this. She forgets a lot of stuff.
But the story has a trick ending. It turns out that there are real Koreans. The Central Office is going to send six of them, all at the same hour, same class, to learn how to teach grammar next Wednesday. Except the vice-principal forgot that Midlord is teaching Beowulf at that hour. And for this they came half-way around the world.
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