Excrement

This happened when I was working in Phuket, Thailand in 1999, mostly teaching children. Getting up every day to teach little kids, some as young as two or three -- well, that will take the sheen off of life in the tropics, let me tell you.







In fact though I mostly don't mind teaching little kids, though of course I think it is borderline inappropriate to have scraggly smelly middle-aged guys doing it. Once you've mastered a class of 20 12-year-olds, however, teaching adults is a piece of fucking cake.

And actually it was a a little girl, of about 10 or 11, who asked me the question about excrement -- a word she found in her electronic talking dictionary.

I ended up losing that job in Phuket, at the end of 1999, when I accidentally sprained a kid's arm when I was teaching a class of 20 3-year-olds at a kindergarten. That, as they say, will have to be another story.