Hey Oh! It has been many moons since last we met...so I will just have to fill you in a bit :)
I am currently sitting in my classroom at school eating my dinner. To my left are educational posters, one of which has a map of the world. On my right the wall is decorated with drawings and writings from my students. Most of them wrote about their favorite candy, Halloween, or what they like to do in the fall. In honour of Halloween, which was thoroughly celebrated at school a few weeks ago, I decided to let them do something fun, like colouring, for a whole class period. I'm pretty pumped about it haha.
For Halloween, the hagwon* that I work for was covered in spiderwebs, scary masks, banners, a couple of pumpkins and generally looking splendidly like Halloween! I have never dressed up to be scary on Halloween before, but this year part of my job was to try and scare at least 70 children, so I gave scary a go. It was so much fun! I don't know if you know this about me, but I really enjoy playing jokes on people. Normally I refrain from scaring people, because friends are good things to have and not everyone takes my idea of innocent fun, in the same way. You can imagine my excitement, then, at being asked to scare the living daylights out of students who, up to this point, I had been trying to calm enough to teach. I was seated at the back of a classroom that had long staggered sheets of black plastic hanging from it's ceiling. A youtube loop beside me was playing actual sound recordings of terrified people screaming in haunted houses. Because the room was so dark the students couldn't hardly see me. They were told to go find me and say "trick-or-treat," at which point I would give them a bag of freshly popped fair-style popcorn. Some times I would sit and play dead until they had stood there long enough to be able to see me a little and had recited their line two or three times; other times I hid behind one of the sheets of plastic and jump out just as they rounded it. Needless to say, I throughly enjoyed myself and in-between kids I would snack on the popcorn haha. One of my boys, who is about 12 years old, screamed when he saw me even before I moved. Other kids were so scared of the dark room that they had a friend go with them. On the way out of the room another teacher would jump out of a box and try to scare them again...it was fun!
Next week, open house will begin at school. The parents of the students will be welcome to come to select classed throughout the next three weeks. I am pretty nervous! Parents are scary. The English level of the parents will very from one extreme to the other and I have no idea who will show up. Most of my efforts in class have been aimed at preparing for that.
I am really starting to love my students which makes work a lot more fun. I sort of have a middle school boy sense of humor, which works out great seeing as I teach middle schoolers every day. Some of my kids are so funny I can't even handle it; true story! Almost every day, one of my students will say something, that is hilarious and those students make class more fun for all of us. The Korean teachers have to be more strict with the kids (I'm not sure they think the students are as funny as I do most of the time), so I get to be the easier more fun class.
Last Wednesday, one of my middle school classes ALL forgot their books, because of a miscommunication. So, I decided to try and get them to write something. They like to talk a lot and have almost no motivation to do their work in a timely manner. One of them asked me to sing, because they wanted to be entertained. I told them that if they finished their writing I would sing. Nate, my student with the least written, was taking his sweet time and I told him that I would sing part of a song when he finished half of his writing. They wanted me to sing "Let It Go" (p.s. Frozen is super popular here). He finished, so I sang every thing until the chorus...obvious cliff hanger. Eventually they had all finished writing, and I sang, as promised. They were an excellent audience, swaying with their hands in the air, until part of they way through, when they stopped. After I finished, I realized that on of the Korean teachers, from down the hall, was looking through the glass in my door. Then it hit me, that I must have been pretty loud. The teachers whose rooms are on my left and right didn't have classes, but apparently the sound carried all the way to my bosses office...I was so embarrassed! I don't usually get embarrassed very easily, but I was pretty bad. I spent the rest of the time explaining, apologizing, or waiting until an opportunity arose to do both. It is pretty funny now. I have students who still ask about it, who I'm fairly certain were in the middle of a test at the time. *sigh* oh well. C'est la vie. haha
*The general term for the many after-school private institutes that children attend in Korea.
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