Day 320...half of my students were absent

Monday November 2

Oh my! I think winter came early. It had been so nice outside so far, but today it got really cold. I should have worn my big coat instead of the lighter one. I wasn't expecting such cold weather.

The forecast says its suppose to be in the 50's and 60's all during the week. Maybe I shouldn't pull out the big coat yet. Currently at 2 AM its 28 degrees. I've got my ondol on and its quite toasty. I'm going to let it get hot and then turn it off at night.

I have 31 students on Monday and 15 of them were absent today.

I only have 11 students on Tuesday. I wonder how many will actually be in class.

I had to wear the mask again. I hate it! Its so hot and difficult to teach wearing a mask.

I guess my first student is no longer at the academy. The Korean teacher mentioned that she wouldn't be there after October. So I didn't have my 2:30pm class today.

My 1st class was good. We did one speaking lesson and then they had free time to play a game. They were excited when I told them we were only doing one lesson today (we usually do two, but there aren't enough lessons in the book to do 2 every class. gotta pace myself). They all said "I love you". At the end of class they thanked me for letting them have free time. There were 4 students who were absent.

My 2nd class was good, but very short. Its hard to practice speaking with only one person when you only have to cover one lesson. We went over the questions and then he had free time. He wanted to go home early, but I'm scared I'll get in trouble for ending the class too early. I gave him a word search to pass time. They still have the decorations up in the class from Halloween. They were covering the white board so I moved one of the balloons. When I pulled the tape the balloon busted! My student took down all the balloons. He had fun popping a few of them with his sharp (Konglish for mechanical pencil).<---I love Konglish! Later he was playing with the balloon just bouncing it against the wall. I only had one student in class today. 3 students were absent.

My 3rd class was my Monday conversation class. Today we took a test. They said the listening part of the test was too fast. Its people talking on a cd. I can't slow it down. I played it multiple times. Plus its straight from the book so its not like they didn't have time to memorize the conversations. Seriously, if these students would realize that I take the material straight from the book they could do well by just spending some time memorizing!haha. After the test we covered a few pages in the conversation book. The lesson today was describing someone's looks-height, hairstyle, etc. 4 students were absent.

My 4th class was spelling. I only had 2 students present and 4 were absent. Class was very peaceful today. I gave them a spelling test and they both didn't do well. We were able to cover 4 pages of material. They were asking for a game so I got to a good stopping point and let them play. They wanted to play volleyball with the balloons so we did that for 10 minutes. I played with them. They were on one team and I was on a team by myself. We have CCTV at our school and the monitor is in the lobby. If anyone was watching they saw us playing with balloons.haha. I wrote everyone's grade on their report sheet to take home. The highest grade was a 75 in spelling. The rest of them had grades from 35 to 50. It looks like I'm a bad teacher, but they don't even care about it. I do all I can. I have them say the word and write the word 5 times each. If they don't study they won't do well. One boy never studies during study time. I ask him if he knows how to spell the words and he says yes, but then he makes a 28 or so. Then one boy just writes nonsense. Last time he made a zero because he just spelled out what number it was 1. number one 2. number two, etc. Maybe their parents will see their bad grades and tell their students to try harder.

After my last class I walked to kimbap heaven and tried something new. I usually get regular dongas but today I got chicken dongas. It was 5,000 won ($4.28) It was good. I think the pork is my favorite though. I also got a menu so I can see what they offer. Knowing hangul really helps because its all in Korean. I figured out most of the catagories.

I skipped the gym tonight because I had a lot of work I needed to do..grading papers, but I ended up not getting any of it done! I'll have 3 hours of free time at work on Tuesday anyway. I keep putting it off because I hate it! Correcting papers is my least favorite thing!