Never work with children or animals.

So, I've got two stories for you this week and I'm going to preface them with this image:

That's a Picnic Bar, something I craved like crazy while google-image-searching for it but it will be an appropriate visual aide for what I'm going to tell you.

Yesterday, I went into my favourite class (Grade 5, class 3) and it was freezing. Granted, it's cold at the moment and the hallways of my school are like the grave, but the classrooms are generally toasty. Small spaces with 35-ish bodies and the heaters on warm up pretty quick. This one was freezing. ALL of the windows and doors were open and the kids were shivering and oddly rowdy - they're my favourite because they're quiet but enthusiastic. After 10 minutes (of a 40-minute lesson) we still hadn't started teaching. I tried to ask my co-teacher Yong-a but she was busy talking to the students. After 15 minutes, the homeroom teacher walked in to the classroom and Yong-a ushered me out of the room and into the teacher's office.

I looked at her with as much of a WTF face as I could muster.

"A student.... Uh...." 

Yong-a motions at her stomach area.

"Oh! A stomach ache?"

Yong-a gives me a look like - 'don't make me say this.'

"Classroom. Bad smell. Student - his mother, he's home to clean up." She motions at her chest area this time, which confuses me even more, (IT GOT UP TO HIS CHEST AREA?) but I think I've got the gist. 

Five minutes later we went back into the class and proceeded to teach one of the worst-received lessons ever. I checked all of the seats and none of the bags were missing, so the student who had gone home after shitting himself was going to return later. Poor kid.

This class came a week after my co-teacher Young-jin said she and her class had spent 20 minutes trying to find out where a particularly hideous odour in their classroom was coming from. She told me that the stench didn't dissipate so it couldn't have been a fart (her telling me this was one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard.) A day later, the homeroom teacher revealed what had happened - one of the students, presumably using a squat toilet, hadn't noticed when he'd pooped on his own jacket and had just returned to class like normal. Gross.