From "Metronome"

“Everyone sit down on your behinds, both cheeks on the floor!”
Jin turned his attention to Ms. Weir, the first grade homeroom teacher, a woman whose eccentricities would never have been allowed to surface in Korea. She was fond of irksome euphemisms, such as “cheeks” and “wee wee’s”, and she dressed monochromatically: her shoes, her clothes, her tights.
“Can we say good morning to Mr. Kim?”
“Good morning, Mr. Kim!” Exclamation points everywhere, like many balloons, rising.
“Good morning,” he stood. “Are you ready to warm up?”
“Yes!!”
That year, the first grade was working on “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from Mary Poppins. Jin hadn’t played any part in the selection of this song, and he was more than grateful that this was the last year the first graders would be singing it.
The choice was problematic for a number of reasons. It was extremely difficult to get first graders to enunciate all of the “cher-ees” and “cher-oos” and the melody was haunting. How a group of parents soberly decided that The Sherman Brother’s bittersweet tune would make an appropriate send-off for the seniors was beyond him. After “Nature Boy”, it had to be the saddest song he’d ever heard in English.
“We’ll take it from the beginning?” The little children crossed right ankles over left, clapped hands together, reached out and poked their friends. Every day was a new beginning for them.
Their eyes opened wide as he played the first stanza- the ba, da-da-dum, ba da-da-dum like a whirling carrousel.

Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-ee!
A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be.
Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-oo!
Good luck will rub off when I shake hands with you!

Their high-pitched, eager voices almost camouflaged the dark current, but the lyrics reinforced the downward-pulling irony of the relentless bass. Ba da-da-dum, ba da da da-da-dam…

Now, as the ladder of life has been strung
You might think a sweep's on the bottommost rung
Though I spend my time in the ashes and smoke
In this whole wide world there's no happier bloke.

Jin stopped. Some of the parents had complained. They were fairly certain that ‘bloke’ was a bad word, but they couldn’t come up with anything to replace it. ‘Rogue’ had been proposed, but that seemed just as bad. The real problem was that the children couldn’t manage the hard ‘k’.
“Remember what we said last week? We were going to cough?”
Jin retook the stanza and looked up at Ms. Weir. He loathed singing out loud, but she was more than happy to demonstrate the phrasing.
“In this whole world there’s no happier blow- KUH!”
“Shall we try it again?”
It was worthless, really. On the day of graduation, the children would be nervous and all of the words would run into each other like colored cereal in milk.
“In this whole world there’s no happier BLOKE. YAW!”
Jin smiled. A lot of these little boys would go home that evening and run around a kitchen island singing “Bloke-ha! Bloke-ha! Bloke-ha!” until their mothers hit them playfully with a dishtowel. Others would go home to quieter households where laughter was viewed as a vulgar display of affection, and it was for these children that Jin the lamented the endless repetition of the song.