It's not possible

In Korean culture, its considered rude to be too abrupt with a negative answer. "No" is softened into "Maybe not", "I don't want to" is "let me think about it" and "I don't know"/"OMG it's a FOREIGNER"/"Please go away and stop talking to me!" is boiled down to "Sorry, it's not possible".

No one is going to flip you the bird, tell you to shove off, or admit to ignorance. Those things just aren't done.

I have learned that there is no intrinsic value to the word "possible". If someone pouts this phrase in my direction, I thank them as politely as my frame of mind will allow, and ask someone else for a second opinion. This trick has not occurred to my co-teacher, Susan.

Susan has been shunted the crap job that all the other English teachers want to avoid: teaching the 6th grade. Last semester, she taught 3rd and 4th graders, who are cute, enthusiastic and sweet. Last semester, the 6th grade class was a bunch of bebe's kids who ended up the year the hallway, kneeling in shame almost every period. They terrorized their homeroom teachers and their subject teachers, and we were all too happy to say "Anyong" (goodbye) at graduation.

When it came time to re-distribute the workload, the other two English teachers vindictively gave her the entire 6th grade class. A task that previously, they had split between the two of them.

"We're tired" they told her, "last semester, you had it easy."

In other words, Susan could suck it.

She's nervous about the switch, and keeps asking me questions about 6th graders. We were in her classroom, preparing for lesson one when I looked up and realized she still had all of the short desks. Considering how big some to the students are, I immediately started giggling.

"What are you going to do about these desks?" I asked her.

"I asked Ghey about that," she said, "but apparently, it's not possible to get new ones."

Now, wait just a tootin' fla-loutin' second.

Why is it that Susan, who now teaches the 6th grade exclusively, cannot simply switch desks with Ghey, who will now teach mainly 4th graders? How does it make any kind of sense for her to hog all of the big desks, when her half-pint sized students will be swinging their legs in their too-tall chairs. If I were Susan, I would have asked this. But when I looked into her brown, guileless eyes, I could see that such a thought had never sparked across her placid brain.

I should have just smiled reassuringly. Or gave a noncommittal nod. Or acted equally puzzled. Any sort gesture of confused solidarity would have been sufficient.

But instead, I looked around the classroom again, and imagined the lanky, the chubby, the awkward 6th graders, who will only get bigger as the year goes on, trying to shove their non-cooperative limbs into those tiny desks.

"Well..." I said, "should be interesting..."