In my third class of the day we were doing the evil dictation because the new books hadn’t arrived and three out of four of them had forgotten their books >_> Anyway, one of the students wasn’t listening for one of the sentences and asked me to say it again. I did and then he asked me to say it again by saying, and I quote, “Alex, CTRL+C, CTRL+V.” like you would if you were talking about a computer. I looked at him and grinned. I wasn’t sure what else to do :P

I wrote “Copy Paste” on my hand so I would remember it, but when I got home, it was smudged and it said, “Gay Pasta” <3

Oh, and while we’re quoting people, I just heard this on an episode of CSI: Las Vegas and it made me laugh:

Warrick “What does this look like to you?” *points to a blood pool*
Gil “A hermaphrodite on roller skates.”
Catherine “A kitten.”
All “…”

As much as my students can be cute and cuddly, they can also be dangerous D: One of my elementary students kicked me because I called her a ‘monkey‘ today. She didn’t mean to kick me as hard as she did, but she has quite heavy slippers and she caught me cleanly in the middle of the shin. It wasn’t a malicious attack either and I didn’t really make anything of it until later when I actually looked at it. I thought it was just going to be a small bruise but there was blood and it’s swollen up. I tried to take a picture but, a) I didn’t think it fair to expose you to my terrible legs, b) I couldn’t get my camera to focus, and c) my leg went numb because of the position I was in trying to take a good shot XD

I’m not going to mention it to her but if she kicks me again I’ll sit on her, squish her up into a ball and stick her in my desk drawer…

Another video for you all. You’ll have to excuse the ending because I dropped the camera and it said I needed to turn it off and on again. The dropping didn’t manage to remove the dork from the video though >>

I might do another video over the weekend once I’ve tidied the place up a little and thrown out some of the dismantled bed/drawers that were lying around. For now, amuse yourselves with this gem:

Me “If you could be any animal, what would you be?”
Student “A crap.”
Me “Excuse me?”
Student “A crap. They walk sideways.”
Me “I think you mean a ‘crab’. C-R-A-B.”
Student “Oh. So what is a ‘crap’?”

On JungChul
I’ve really enjoyed my time at JungChul thus far. The position of the school is pretty good and it only takes about 3-5 minutes for me to walk from the apartment. The teachers are all very nice and have done their best to welcome me despite the language barrier. The school has small classrooms and small classes which suits me down to the ground.

There have been some times when I’ve been caught totally off guard. A case in point happened today during my ‘Home Call’ class which I took to mean a general registration class where the kids can do what they want as long as it’s constructive. Well, I was shown to the Teacher’s Office by Sunny and she sat me down with list of names and telephone numbers and phoned the first one. She had a quick talk and then passed me the phone. I was supposed to ask basic English questions to this kid on the other end of the phone and when I was done I gave it back to her. She the proceeded to explain how it was my job to go through the list one by one and spend a little time speaking with each one o_O I mean, I speak no Korean. My ‘equalisers’ such as the ability to point and write on the board were totally nullified by the phone and so I had to grab my English book and quickly learn the joys of phone conversation in Korea so that I could identify myself on the phone in case a parent answered. Typically, that’s what happened each and every time but by the end of it, I could say hello, tell them that it was Alex, the English teacher from JungChul hagwon calling about a Home Call for ‘X’. Was I proud of myself? Damn straight.

Oh, remember the ‘quote posters’ I mentioned in the last post? *points down*

Below are all of them in their entirety:

“A raga to riches story.”
“Out of the frying pan into the fire.”
“Rome was not built in a day.”
“Birds of a feather flock together.”
“You ars the man who was born to be loved.”
“Don’t change horses in midstream.”
“Set a beggar on horseback, and he’ll ride to the devil.”
“Brevity of the soul of wit.”
“Poverty is no disgrace, but it is a great inconvenience.”
“Let’s get to the point.”
“Fish and guests stink after three days.”

On teaching
On the whole, I’ve enjoyed my start to teaching. Quirks of the Korean teaching system make me smile a lot. An example would be today when I had my penultimate class and only 2 boys turned up. I enquired as to where the other 3 girls were and they said ‘the Boss’ had them. I decided to start without them and 10 minutes later there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find the 3 girls standing there with their hands above their heads and the Boss behind them. They apologised for being late to my class and were each hit over the head with a role of paper before being allowed in…I thought I was in some Korean drama :D The Boss rocks my socks because of his rapport with the students and the children are great for just being there XD

There is a diversity to the children as you might expect. The younger ones are noisy and tend to ignore me, as do the middle aged ones but there are always some really good ones in each class. The older classes are either exceptionally quiet or pretty chatty. I prefer the chatty ones and I’ve already got an absolute favourite class. I just had them before I got home and there are 3 boys and as of today, 5 girls [a new one just joined] and they’re good fun. The boys are pretty quiet but the girls more than make up for it but in a good way because they ask me questions and genuinely improve their English. They even invited me to Seoul with them this weekend which we’re going to talk about next time I have them ^^

Sorry for the long post but I’m also considering a photo meme. If you want a picture of anything in the apartment then let me know. I’ll close it after the weekend ^^