And you thought it would kill me.

As of this afternoon, I have officially completed a two week stint forcing small Korean children to speak in a language they find confusing and nonsensical with only the threat of hard labor and the promise of stickers to motivate them.

I’ve drilled elementary schoolers in the days of the week, the months of the year, the finer points of nouns and verbs, and the subtle difference between “in the corner” and “on the corner” until calendars, action words, and the edges of rooms and street corners haunt all of our nightmares. I have threatened and cajoled them into acting out “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Our Class Pet” in which one enviable child plays a parrot, and been harried to within a sad centimeter of my sanity. Because we do centimeters here.

I’ve been sprayed in the face with a fire hose, been water gunned repeatedly in every face hole I have until four of my five senses have been materially damaged, sustained a nearly mortal elbow wound from a water-squirting sword (the sword part is really the critical element there – the water is mere insult on that injury), and had my green flip flops thrown in a mud puddle. I’ve pulled the fingernails of little boys out of other little boys’ nearly bleeding arms, made minors do squats, and been the unrepentant cause of more than a few tears.

I have watched one 60-second clip of Pocahontas roughly four trillion times (“This is how we say hello: wingapo.”), and been tricked into drinking a flavor of Fanta that both burned and tasted like medicine. I’ve nearly been driven to fisticuffs in order to obtain just one more pair of scissors (pink), stolen more than my fair share of A4 (white) and index cards (lined, wide rule), and had more than a couple heated arguments with a non-English speaking copy machine (grey, in an irritating way).

I have mercilessly judged the talent show offerings of middle schoolers and been personally gratified by the fact that my own charges won the whole shebang, even more so since I had absolutely nothing to do with the invention, teaching, learning, or performance of their talent. I think it was the sampling of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” that won the judges over in the end and I’m glad that people in my vicinity thought of it so I can take an undue amount of the credit for myself.

I’ve given and received more high fives than I care to count, had my words turned into a mantra and dance performed at random by half a dozen little girls, and been given seahorse pictures with messages scrawled in hilariously sweet English by my own little class. I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m so pretty (in a rather effective ploy to get more stickers), had random children point at my face and say “blue” (I assume in reference to my eye color, not the fact that I am somehow generally corpse-colored), and given at least one compliment that was understood and fully hit its mark (since afterward its recipient always bowed to me and beamed and answered questions in class when before she’d avoided both eye contact and anything that may have seemed remotely like speaking.)

I have willingly suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous cafeteria food made desirable by virtue of its freeness, waited with bated breath for potato, bacon, and onion pies to arrive from Mr. Pizza, eaten the hardest chocolate chocolate chip cookies known to man three times, and supplemented my diet with ice cream from various sources at every opportunity. I’ve watched professors beat the staff at basketball, students beat professors at a water balloon fight, and the most struggling kid in class beat all the rest at the two math problems I made them do last week.

Three hundred kids, twenty foreign professors, twenty TAs, and thirteen staff members bravely went “Swimming in the English Ocean” this summer at English Camp without our water wings and have somehow, miraculously, washed up on shore battered and bruised, but alive.

Result: I’m invincible.

Six months to go until Winter Camp.