Day 355

Monday December 7

10 more days and it will officially be one year!! I would have been going home in 10 days, but things didn't go as planned. I think things turned out pretty good in the end. It's been a life changing experience and I'm going to miss Korea. It's a crazy place and I love it. I won't miss teaching. I'll miss my students. Even though I complain all the time,I still adore them. I think its hard for them to respect someone so young. I'm probably the youngest teacher at my campus. They are just trying to be kids and English isn't a priority although I'd love to see them succeed. I want to make a difference. Hopefully something that I taught them has sunk in. I wish I knew how to get them excited about learning English and doing things that really help them.

I had a pretty good day.

My first student of the day showed up at 2:50. Class started at 2:30. I think he’s younger than all the rest of my students. He’s a lot smaller than them. Maybe 2/3rd grade?(all of my students are 4-6th grade). He's in the lowest level. I'm not sure how much English he understands. We went over the 1st lesson. Covered 5 pages in 20 minutes. I don’t think he really understood putting it in ABC order. I’ll have to work on that more.

My 2nd class was great. I had 2 new students.2 were absent. 1 of my students who skipped month is back. It was good to see him again. We covered 2 lessons. One about the handicapped and watching tv. We had a good class and everyone participated. They had 5 mins free time. One my students told me he had to leave early. He said he had to leave at 4:30. When he told me that it was already 4:35. Then he changed his mind to 4:40. I reminded him and he finally left at 4:50. He said he had to go play piano somewhere.

My 3rd class was good. I only had 1 student. We did 1 lesson about questions starting with when.She did a good job on most of them. We finished early and played hangman the rest of class.

My conversation class was rowdy as usual. I had to keep telling them to be quiet over and over. They still didn't really listen. I'm trying to talk over them. Some are paying attention and others are just playing around. 2 girls were playing around and playing with their cell phones. Some other girls were talking in the back of the room. When I came in class today one of the students told me he had a headache. He kept telling me over and over. His neighbor said he was faking. He kept saying he wasn't. He asked me for aspirin but I didn't have any. I let him go to the info desk to see if they had any. Then his neighbor said he was faking because he was smiling. ok whatever. Today's lesson was about "What's the matter?". We were talking about various health problems such as headaches, stomach aches, etc. There weren't many speaking practice opportunities, not that they would actually do it anyway. The girl who never does her work actually did some of it today. I still have to go around the room and tell people to do their work. Some don't do it. Oh well. Next week we are having a test on 3 units. I picked 3 units where almost all of the students were present.

My 5th class was decent. They are doing a lot better with the speaking book rather than the spelling. I'm giving them their first test on Friday. Today we were talking about holidays such as halloween, valentines, etc. They really enjoy when I write the words on the board and leave out letters. They all rush up to the board to fill in the blanks. Then they are proud when they did it right. One of them kept telling me. "number one is perfect"(he filled in the blanks for number 1).haha. They begged for a game. I told them we'd play a game if we covered the 4 pages I wanted to cover and if they were really good. Their behavior was pretty good, but they still get a little loud sometime and don't really listen to the class cd that I play. I gave them a few minutes of free time. I told them no game on Wednesday. We can't play a game every day.