I have never in my life had any ambition whatsoever to be a kindergarten teacher. Even when I fantasized about being a teacher, which was not often, it was always of middle or high school honor students whom I would expose to great literature and inspire to write well. I imagined myself as Mr. Poirier or Mr. Skinner, the English teachers who meant the most to me, leading students in intense discussions of Kafka and diagramming sentences joyfully together. I never wanted to be like Miss Marney, my kindergarten teacher, who convinced me that you could see the windmills of her native Dutch or whatever it was if you just squinted hard enough at the nearest line of hills.

And yet here I am. On a recent afternoon it was suggested in all seriousness that I play Santa Claus in the kindergarten winter show. My initial reaction was to burst out, "But I'm Jewish!" We were sitting around a low table eating lunch, Jenny and me and the Korean kindie English teachers, Suky, Sue and Eddie. I explained Chanukkah in such a way that they no longer felt sorry for me over my not having a Christmas, but as the only white man and certainly the hairiest person in the employ of the kindergarten — one of the students who is not quite right in the head enjoys running up to me, tugging my arm hair and shrieking with glee — I will presumably be donning gay apparel that has nothing to do with club gear or hot pants. Ho, ho, ho.

Upon reflection, though, the surprising thing is not that I'll be playing Santa Claus, but that I'll be involved in a kindergarten pageant at all, much less a Korean one. A year ago I was a tech writer in New York City, a well-paid, career-tracked, skilled professional in a high-tech industry in the thrumming metropolis that all sensible people recognize as the center of the universe. Granted, like most New Yorkers I had fantasies of leaving, but they were dreams of Seattle or something like it, some Western city full of hipsters and good bookstores and funky local musicians and surrounded by mountains — someplace where I could get a job as a tech writer and drive a Saturn and be a liberal yuppie with a novel in the works and a set of vague plans involving Bali and Thailand if only I could find the time.

And as for working with children, well, nice people do that. To be completely honest, I always shied away from the nice-people jobs — things like working with Alzheimer's patients or doing physical therapy with injured sea lions — because they have a whiff of saintliness about them that makes them completely unsexy, at least for me. Being a tech writer is not quite like being a secret agent or a lion tamer, but it has a little bit of cachet, possibly even a very slight bit of sexiness. It involves computers, which at least until the recession were getting continually sexier, even Matrix-level sexy; and it involves writing, which while pretentious is also potentially sexy. I'll admit that inventory forecasting software manuals do not exactly read like the diaries of Anais Nin, but upon meeting a tech writer or a Web designer or a reupholsterer of sofas, I felt no obligation to chase every last wanton thought from my brain. For no especially good reason, I did feel that obligation when it came to the nice people with the nice-people jobs, whom I duly sainted and kept at arm's length, and I guess I was subconsciously worried that if I took such a job, other people would share this particular neurosis and refuse to think wanton thoughts in my presence, which would be a shame.

Fortunately these prejudices have not prevented me from landing in what turns out to be the fabulous job of teaching kindergarten, which is physically exhausting and so much fun. In Korea kindergarten kids are as young as three, too little even to color effectively, but they're still good to play with. I get to do the Hokey Pokey and sing Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. I get to bounce a rubber ball around the room and watch a bunch of little kids fling themselves after it with abandon. I get to decide that today we will color the car and the truck, but we won't color the ambulance until tomorrow. I get free hugs, and yesterday one of my students threw herself into my lap and kissed my cheek, and the day before that one of them came up behind me and gave me a massage, and the day before that — my third day, mind you — I walked past an open door where one of my students suddenly ran up, pointed at me, and shouted, "I like Josh Teacher!" And then another one did too. I have been given candy and the aforementioned rubber ball and more candy and an origami handbag. Four times a day, a chorus of young voices shouts, "I'm fine, thank you, and you?" Then I ask them how the weather is, and they tell me, more or less: "It's cloudy and cold!" they cry out, which is fine except when the sun is shining. On Fridays we go on field trips to places like the Suwon Folk Village, and then I don't even have to try and make them sit down and write the letter F or anything difficult like that. I just herd them, which would be easier with dogs but really isn't all that hard anyway.

And they're funny. One of Jenny's students, Sally, likes to come up to you, put her face right in yours, and pop out her tongue like a lizard. One of my kids, Ted, likes to throw his hands in the air and cry out, "Teddy Bear!" which is his nickname, right before he does something he shouldn't like knock over his chair or crawl under the table. Guile is not the strong suit of four-year-olds. The other day I was bouncing the rubber ball and decided to test their savvy against that of dogs by doing fake throws, and they caught on about as quickly as a six-year-old collie might.

One of my classes is learning adjectives, which are endlessly entertaining to teach. For fast and slow, we marched around the room fast and then slow, fast and then slow, and one day I brought my harmonica so they could dance fast and slow, fast and slow. For tall and short we stood on our chairs and stretched up high, then squatted down on the floor. For long and short I impressed them by balling up a piece of string in my fist and letting a bit of it dangle — short! — then gradually pulling it out so that it was now long. Teacher can do magic! You can probably imagine the nature of the demonstrations of noisy and quiet, and which of the two my students prefer. They now know that 1 + 1 and reading the alphabet chart are easy, while scary impossible math problems and reading paragraphs from the teacher's manual are hard. And they have been informed that when they are happy and they know it they should clap their hands, when they are sad and they know it they should cry and cry, and when they are angry and they know it — their favorite — they should bang their fists, which they do very well.

Another nice thing about the kindergarten, having nothing to do with the kids, is the work environment. ECC, the main English academy, is filthy, cold, crowded and presided over by the ever-scowling Yu-jin, who looks suspicious whenever teachers are talking to each other or else not talking to each other. Kindergarten, by contrast, is clean, spacious, effectively heated and run by Annie, a perfectly pleasant woman who seems genuinely interested in both teachers and children. The students are not, to her, mere cogs in a complex piece of financial machinery, and we teachers get free Korean-food lunch whenever we want it. And the atmosphere of goodwill and helpfulness percolates down through the teachers: the other day I was actually consulted by Suky about the moving of a student from one class to another. She's a formidable woman with a master's in biophysics from SUNY Buffalo, and she's the most experienced of the kindie teachers. (She's also extremely helpful and knows shortcuts to just about everywhere we need to go in Anyang — we now walk to kindergarten in fifteen minutes instead of spending a half hour riding the bus.) So we now spend our mornings at kindergarten, have a break of a few hours, and then head over to ECC to finish out the day. The time there goes by much faster, and we still have an actual evening afterwards, and the days are way easier to get through.

Working with young children is marvelous, and I am glad that I let circumstance take me here. Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, has written about our tendency to be dragged through life by our habit energies. For me, it wasn't until Jenny was already a couple of months into her plan to come teach in Korea that it even dawned on me that I could go with her — that there was nothing that required me to be a tech writer in Seattle and that I was free to try something else. When I made the discovery, I felt elated and light. Actually coming here was scary, but it was also a new adventure for which I felt fully awake and excited, and I've found that the best things are often the ones that feel scary right when you're about to start — going to college in New York, riding the Green Tortoise coast to coast, going to India, falling in love. And more often than not these opportunities have been right in front of me, just there for the taking whenever I was present enough to notice them. That's one reason why I've been working on being more present all the time, which is something little kids are good at. The kids recognize what we all should, which is that a rubber ball bouncing around a room is really a fabulous thing, that there's no reason not to love someone you just met simply because he's been vaguely nice to you once, and that the Hokey Pokey is an entirely worthwhile activity if you do it like you mean it. Which they so do.