This week has gone by rather slow considering we had Wednesday off for election day. To make matters worse, there are no classes at my school tomorrow, but I have to show up anyways. I asked Jiny what we do and she said, read a book, surf the web, nap. My guess is I will read for a bit, update on facebook and then piss off to the nurses' room to nap. Tomorrow is going to be an excruciatingly painful 8 hour work day.
Monday I spent the day with the grade 6's with the exception of one grade 3 class. The grade 6's get more and more nervous as they get to know me. I think it is because I've started taking on more teaching and because at the start of every class I ask them personal questions. This week's topic was family, so I basically just ask them how many people in your family? Older brother/sister? Elementary school, middle school or high school? Do you have any pets? I'm not sure why they are so scared to get randomly chosen and answer these questions. I think it's because they are forced to use english and they are put on the spot. Plus, I think they are scared that I'm judging them and they hate to make mistakes in front of me. The most enjoyable part of the 6th grade classes this week was learning yet another song. This song was a song about directions and Jiny had the students do this weird dance thing whenever the character would say a certain word. For example, if the words sorry, right, left, straight were said the students had to bounce up and down. It was the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, but it was funny as hell. I enjoyed watching them and how embarrassed they were getting by doing it.
Remember, the girl who told me I had big eyes? Well, she had more in store for me this week. I guess I must have looked extra good on Tuesday because when I walked into her class she got all googlie eyed and giggly. She then started speaking Korean to Jiny and Jiny then translated to me that she was saying I looked different and very pretty. I was flattered and I smiled and said thank you. Naturally, that seemed like the thing to do. It's been a while since I've discussed my teacher crush, so I will update you on him. On Monday I basically stared at him at lunch in his cute little Nike track suit, which was the only time I saw him. Then Tuesday my day was made when he actually set foot in the 6th grade office and spoke and laughed, not to me of course, but to Yong. I think he avoids making eye contact with me because he fears I will speak English to him and make him speak it to me. He is the cutest thing ever and I can't help but smile everytime I see him. Don't worry nothing will become of it.
Today was a very long day because I taught 5 grade 3 classes and today was my first teacher class. As you all know I love the grade 3's and the great thing about teaching them is that Mrs. Kim lets me teach the entire 40 minute lesson all by myself. I was nervous at the beginning of the week, but by the second class today I was on fire. I loved every second of it. The grade 3's are usually really good students, which is why they are so much fun to teach. However, they tend to get off track and talk occasionally, so I'm forced to use my outside voice with them. Well, that only works half the time and the rest of the time I just stand at the front of the class and don't say anything and see how long it takes them to quiet down or for Mrs. Kim to jump in and calm them down. They started a new unit this week, which is learning basic objects/words. Mrs. Kim and I decided against using the text book because we find the dialogue really cheesy and the students learn more when someone is standing at the front making them repeat the words. The game we played for this lesson is called "snap" (you should all remember this card game), the students say, "what's this?" then I reply, "it's an orange, etc." The person who slaps the card with the orange on it the fastest gets to keep that card, so you want to have the most cards by the time the game is finished. I never thought I would see the day that grade 3's were so competitive. In one of today's classes a boy student pulled another boy students hair and made him cry. I did what any normal teacher/human would do and went over to the boys (I saw it happen) and told the one kid to apologize and cut it out or he could go sit in the hallway and then I told the kid who was crying to play fair and that he would be ok. I felt that I couldn't baby him because then he would expect it all the time and he was cheating a little bit, still didn't deserve to have his hair pulled, but it happened nonetheless. Then when class ended and Mrs. Kim and I were escaping the kid who was crying pulled the other boys hair to get him back. I was like, give me a freakin' break. That's when I left and just gave up.
The teacher's class was interesting, only 5 female teachers showed up. They wanted to learn pronunciation and basic conversation. I was a little unprepared, but I managed to make the class go by surprisingly fast. It's hard to teach basic conversation when you don't know certain words or forget to put certain words in sentences, so I told them next week I would bring a list of commonly mispronounced words and how to correctly write/speak sentences using nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, etc. May sound boring, but kind of detrimental to learning proper english. They all kind of looked at me like I was nuts when I was trying to explain to them why jumping right to basic conversation would be too hard if they didn't the basic words and word order. Anyways, I got paid extra for the class today, so I have no complaints.
Since, we had Wednesday off a bunch of us went out Tuesday night for dinner and drinks, which inevitably led to noreabang. Laura and I crashed a Korean noreabang party and they were awesome about it. We sang Dancing Queen for them and I had choreographed moves, which they loved even more. The pictures on this blog are the Koreans Laura and I karaokeed with. Laura, Karalee and I went shopping at Bupyeong underground, which is a
shopping frenzy in the subway station. It was insanely busy, as always, but I made some good finds. 
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