Day 419

Tuesday Feb 9

I was looking at the newspaper site that I have to use for my classes today. I'm not happy with the quality of articles for this week. They are all boring. The ones for the lower level are short. 4 sentences? really?

For the older kids I chose: Running is good for your brain, English robots, A dog who travelled 700km to find his owner, and insect candy

FOr the younger kids I chose: Learn from your mistakes, butter is bad for your heart, a new baby born in Haiti, world's oldest dog, and Vancouver

In my first class we had 2 speaking lessons on animals and famous people. The lessons were very short so they had a lot of free time.

My 2nd class was not good. The boys were constantly talking and not even paying attention and being too loud. Most of the time they didn’t even know where we were in the reading. If they paid attention I wouldn’t have to show them where we were reading from. Our topics were “leave me alone” and “parents”. We finished the book today.There was one funny moment. I asked one of the boys to read a question. He read the question from the wrong page. Then he found out that the page we were doing was on the floor. The boy beside him busted out laughing and then the whole class was laughing.One of our questions was "Does your family love you?". One student said his family doesn’t love him because he plays on the computer too much. Another one said “maybe”.There was one boy and one girl who always knew where we were and paid attention so I gave them a sticker. The other 3 boys did not get one

The 3rd class was my newspaper class. I started out with 10 students in the class and every desk was occupied except the one at the front of the class. Near the end of class another student came in so we ended up with 11 students and We had to move desks around so he'd have a place to sit. 2 of the students were from my MWF class. They missed class yesterday so they came today. They will be hearing the same material over again on Friday. One of our topics was English robots. I asked all the students if they wanted to learn from a robot. Some said yes because robots are cool. A few said no because they don't like robots. I personally think that English teaching robots are a bad idea. You need a human to teach you how to speak. The boys were loud in class. Most of them were not paying attention or even on the right page.

After class one of my students in the newspaper class told me that there was an earthquake.

I looked it up on the internet. An 3.0 earthquake hit at 6:08 which was during my newspaper class. I didn't even feel it.

In my last class we had 2 speaking lessons about lifeguards and lying. My students who came from my mwf class didn't bring their books so I had to make a copy. While I was making copies the copier kept getting jammed. I think it happened about 2 or 3 times in a row. Some of my students were sticking their head out the door trying to find out why I was taking so long. We had a good class. One of the lessons was about lying. One of the boys answers made me laugh. I was asking him if he ever lied. He told me that he did. He said if someone is ugly he will sometimes lie and tell them they are beautiful or handsome. haha. Then that same boy wanted to know what "truth" meant. He knew all about lying but didn't know what truth was. He said its okay to lie when he gets a bad grade but he doesn't want his mom to know about it.

My plans for this weekend fell through. The KTX bullet train was all booked. We could have taken an express bus but I really didn't want to ride a bus for nearly 5 hours. Plus its the holiday weekend so it might take even longer. I'll just do some exploring around Seoul and check out the traditional folk games and activities at Gwanghwamun.

I watched "The Bachelor". This show is just full of drama. I can't believe its only the 6th episode and they are already down to 3 girls-Vienna, Gia and Tenley. I don't know who he will end up picking. I don't really have a favorite. This week Ali chose to leave because of her job (just like Ed on the bachelorette). She had to choose love or job. She chose the sure thing. I was reading on the message boards and someone said she worked for Facebook. I probably would have done the same thing. Who would give up a job at Facebook? I think Facebook would be a sweet job to have. They probably have tons of perks. Then Jake was devastated because she left.