2. Barbola?

Do any of you know what that is? I'm going to make a prediction -- the only one of all of you that I send this to who may know what "Barbola" is probably going to be Dan Kaiser. And even then, I doubt it.

I had to teach "Barbola" today (my first day!) to a group of Korean ESL kids. Strange.

I bet you're wondering what "barbola" means... well, I'll tell you... or at least I'll tell you what the book I was given says it means.

"Barbola" is the meaning of 'Pressed Flower'. We make barbola to keep petals in beautiful and natural state."

That was from my science lesson today. The science Teacher's Guide is kind of hilarious to read, the English is just so bad.

All of the teachers have a 'special activity' class that they teach to all the classes in the school -- like Physical Education or Music. I had originally been told that mine would be science and I was kind of bummed because not only is science kind of boring to me, but one of the other 'special activity' options that was still open was "Storytelling", and as anyone who has ever observed me with children will know, this is a huge strength of mine (if you don't mind my bragging). I love telling kids stories, I love reading to kids, and so I was kind of sad. But God obviously knows all of this because I was told at the end of the day that I wouldn't be teaching any more science, in fact I would be the 'storytelling' teacher. So that is absolutely fantastic.

Of course, as I say this before I have actually tried to read stories to ESL students, I could be totally wrong, and it could turn out to be horrible. But I'm excited. The idea of teaching things like "barbola" for a year was just depressing.

My main class is the "Cookie Monster" class, and they are... well... I know that David had said that the "Snoopy" class was the worst, and I haven't had them yet so he may be right, but Cookie Monster is pretty bad. There are 9 kids in Cookie Monster, and 6 of them wouldn't stay still for more than 4 seconds at a time, and the other 2 (one girl was away today) were glued to their seats with their lips sealed shut. Disciplining kids is not something I enjoy, but I'm afraid I will have to be quite stern for a while. I normally like to start with some sort of reward system, but that is almost impossible because there is no way to explain it to them. Punishment is fairly self-explanatory. Hopefully I can get them in line fairly quickly and then the rewards can start to flow.

The thing that was really frustrating was that I was afraid to be strict with them due to something that I'm sure was unintended. Mr. Lee (the director of the school) gave me a big folder full of things like routine questions to start the day, etc... but on top of all the papers was a letter written by the former teacher apologizing for "yelling at the children" and scaring them. It's not that I'm a fan of yelling at children, I'm really not, but sometimes it's just necessary... and that letter had me thinking that I wasn't allowed to yell at all. Towards the end of the day I finally had a chance to mention that to one of the other Canadian teachers (a girl named Suzanne) and she said that the other teacher (whose name was Ronnie) actually lost control and went ballistic on the children. Not quite the same thing as raising your voice to keep control of an unruly class. I spent most of the morning employing those wonderfully idealistic classroom control strategies that they teach you in Teachers' College -- like lowering your voice to lower the volume of the kids, or standing near the problem students. Those strategies work with a reasonably well behaved class -- or even a slightly unruly class -- but with a class who has basically had the run of things for their entire school career, you need to come down harder. Well, now I know. Tomorrow will be different.

I got to teach two other classes today -- Peter Pan and Tweety. It's kind of neat to get to move around, and now that I have storytelling I'll be teaching every class at some point.

I seem to be starting off with the bad things... that's not good. The kids are precious! They really are. I've already had a few of them tell me that they "love Jenny Teacher", and had a few hugs. And they are remarkably advanced for their age... writing full sentences in a language that is not their own.

Oh, on the age thing... I've unlocked that mystery. I had been told I would be teaching kindergarten, but that kindergarten meant 7 years old. Well, 7 years old in Korea means something different than it does in Canada. In Canadian terms that can mean anything from 4 to 6. When you are born in Korea, you are considered 1 year old, and then the first Lunar New Year (which is in February) you hit you turn 2... so technically you can be 2 years old in Korea before you would be 1 years old in Canada.

Oh, I should tell you my kids names (at least the names of my main class). Justin, Matthew, Annie, Ashley, Brian, Kiersten, Shawn, Brian-Song (yeah, I know, but that's his English name) and Grace (who wasn't there today). Justin is my main handful, and the class follows his lead. He starts to misbehave, then Matthew follows, and once Matthew has gone off then Brian-Song, then Brian, and... well you get the idea.

In other news it's cold. Really cold. Well, probably not really cold, it's just damp. The classrooms are nicely heated, but the staff room (where I spent most of today actually... I don't have a full class load yet) is freezing. I looked down at my hands at one point and my fingers were blue! Literally. I've never seen that before, and I lived in Winnipeg for 7 years.

Mr. Lee just came by and he's coming back in a few minutes to bring me a stove so I'd better sign off for now.