It's like they're giants.

I'm about 5'8" and by no means a tall guy back home. However, before coming to Korea I thought that I would be a lot taller over here than in America, but that's just not the case. I have several coworkers that are taller than me by more than two inches. I'm probably average in height with the other men at my school, but I stand like I have scoliosis, so I know that I appear shorter than them. It doesn't really bother me at all, but I noticed that there are a lot sixth graders this year that are my height or taller than me. Last school year, there were only two sixth graders taller than me and about 8 that were around the same height. In the fifth grade, no one was taller than me. Now there are over a dozen kids that are my height and more than 4 kids taller than me. My students are at an age where they'll be growing at ridiculous rates, but I noticed that a lot of the kids bigger than me were students that had transferred to my school.

I ended up asking my co-teacher about it and she said it's because our school started a basketball team. This sounded really strange to me, since transferring kids to our school during their final year of elementary makes it look like we're illegally drafting kids or gerrymandering school zones just to steal all the athletes in the district. I'm sure there's some logical reason though. Anyway, the basketball team is actually something that I would like to get involved with. It sounds like it'd be really fun to help coach or something.

The only problem though, is that my kids think I'm some sort of basketball god. It's something that I'm not sure if I want to give up just yet either. It all started in my first month at Yeonhak. A few boys were in the gym playing basketball during lunch so I picked up one of the balls and just started dribbling. I put the ball down and then started walking off when one of the kids passed me the ball and told me to shoot it. At that point I was standing at half court, but I shot the ball anyway. I ended up sinking the shot and all the kids in the gym saw it. So since then, I've never played basketball again just so the legend lives on.