Gotta love them kids

After being verbally harassed by the creator to post, I've decided to share my best conversation I've had with my kids this year. Mind you, not a single adult that I meet believes that I'm out of high school, let alone teach them yet in spite of my boyish looks, all my students believe I have a wife and several kids (neither which are true...yet).

Student A: Do you want to have kids?
Me: Uh...
Student B: No, Mr. Kwok don't have kids. He sees us and dont wanna have kids no more.

Student B later on: The only reason why I'd want to have kids is so I can whoop them.

Needless to say, I could not stop laughing. Made me also rethink if I do want to have kids and whether I'd whoop them...

"He's at least 30, yo"

Marcus's hand shot up a little bit too quickly and at too odd a time for his question to be about today's lesson. I was expecting "When do we get out of here?" or "Can I go to the bathroom?" Instead, he paused for a moment and smirked. "How old are you?"

I'm the world's worst liar, and I'm 22 years old. You can read my facial expressions like a book, so I had a lot of fear in that moment that my whole house of cards was going to come tumbling down in front of me. I wasn't having a particularly strong sales moment, so I cracked up for a second and continued teaching without answering. Of course, that invested every other student in the class in the answer to this question.

"42!" (I don't think that one was serious.) "34!" "25!"

"Nah, he's at least 30, yo."

Clearly I wasn't getting out of this without an answer. My internal random number generator landed on 27. "27 - now Marcus, remind me how to test if a relation on a graph is a function," I said.

They totally bought it. The grumblings I heard afterward were that I was lying and lowballing my age.

Lessons:

1) Continue wearing a tie. Backwards hats cut your age by 15%, and ties apparently inflate it by 30%.

2) Kids are pretty gullible. I'm on the lookout for strategies to positively exploit this more.