"Good morning, Chrees-uh Teacher!"

The greeting rang shrill in my ears, puncturing through a horrendous hangover. It was a sunny morning in Seoul and ten kindergartners were awaiting English instruction. They were about to be disappointed.

"Guys, Chris Teacher went drinking with your alcoholic dads last night, so I'm just going to take some personal time dying over here. Why don't you draw me a few nice pictures?"

They stared at me, unsure. It was their second week of class. I was still looking for a way to jar them out of their nervousness, to push beyond rote parroting into actual communication, clumsy or otherwise. If I had to play that awful CD of chants and songs one more time...

"Draw the picture," I reiterated, leaning weakly against the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. The ceiling fan rattled and cut a swath through the silence.

I grabbed a marker and sketched Street Fighter's Ryu hurling a fireball at an evil-looking soju bottle. "See? Like this. Only throw some English words in there too, so I can show your parents how much you're learning."

In Korean private ESL schools, or hagwans, presentation is everything. Mastering a language isn't measured by usual standards -- the ability to hold a conversation, for instance -- but rather by the lavishness of a class's stage production of the Three Little Pigs. If parents ever threatened to pull a kid from our school, my usual response was to stamp a huge '100%' on the top of their next test, and pepper the margins with smiley-face stickers. It kept the kids from quitting 100% of the time. We sold dog-and-pony shows, not education.

I handed out paper from the supply cupboard and my class began the elaborate ritual of locating their crayons. They understood their mission: a teaching success! "Good job everyone," I said. "It's pony time."

Most of the girls set to work meticulously copying my Ryu masterpiece off the board. The more adventurous ones added hearts and flowers in the background. Grace drew a picture of herself and then scribbled out her face with a black crayon, like that kid in The Ring. I made a mental note to never turn my back on her again.

The boys all drew pictures of themselves fighting a bear, or their dad, or me. They added numbers to signify the damage they were inflicting, just like in an RPG. In one rendition, I was getting hit with several trillion points of surface-to-surface missile damage but remained standing. It was sweet that these kids believed I had so much HP.

"So, you guys like games huh?" I asked, ambling around the table with a glass of water. "That's pretty cool." They ignored me studiously.

"Games!" I yelled, and kicked over a spare chair with a clatter. The secret to maintaining command of a classroom is to be wildly unpredictable within a set routine. Once I had their attention, I wrote G-A-M-E on the whiteboard.

"Teacher! Me, teacher!"

"Me me me!"

Tiny hands waved in the air. I wasn't sure what I was choosing someone for, but at least the class was engaged.

"Uh ... sure. Okay, how about Shetland."

Pro tip: Never let anyone choose your English name for you, even if it is your teacher.

Shetland stood up proudly and pointed at the whiteboard. "Gee. Aye. Em. Eee."

Ah, spelling. I led the class in a slow clap for Shetland. "Nice one, bud. But -- everybody -- what is a game?"

John III (there were three Johns) held up his picture, which depicted a fedora-wearing bear destroying a small city. Also, the fedora had guns.

"Is there a Korean game about murderous bears from swingtown? What game is that? Can anybody tell me their favorite game?"

More confused looks. I tried to use full sentences with the kindergartners as often as possible because six-year-old brains are like sponges. Even if they don't understand right away, these kids latch onto vocabulary and sentence structure with freakish intuition. In the meantime, however, I had a few aces up my sleeve:

"PC games. Maple Story. Kart Rider."

The entire class went wild.

Korean children live to play computer games. The harsh competitiveness of the education treadmill devours most of their free time, as they're shunted from English school to science school to piano lessons to taekwondo. From a very early age, parents push their progeny to excel. They need to get into the best grade school so they can make it into the best high school which feeds into the best universities which, ultimately, determines their corporate career possibilities. The rat race begins at the age of six.

But in their scant few hours of unscheduled leisure time, these kids are more often than not grinding levels in Maple Story or hanging out at a "PC bang" (the Korean version of an internet café) with their fathers, watching dad practice his Starcraft build order. Gaming is in their blood. Why hadn't I thought of this sooner?

My students were boiling over, fiercely arguing in Korean; probably something about loot drop percentages. Shetland looked about ready to punch one of the Johns. Grace was over by the window, trying to wedge her head through the bars that prevented her from falling seven stories to certain death. Things were getting out of control.

I started counting down from 5 as I extricated Grace from the window. "5... 4... 3..." They didn't know what would happen if I hit zero and, honestly, I didn't either, but so far their imaginations had worked just fine as deterrence. The room hushed up and everyone looked at me expectantly. This was a new kind of quiet: a silence bursting at the seams. I sat down with the kids at the end of the table, a huge grin on my face. I was beginning to feel much better, and not just because my hangover was subsiding. I had found a gateway into their lives.

"Now, very calmly, I want each of you to tell me about your Maple Story character."

And they started talking.