19. Not the Philippines

I have plenty of pictures to post from the Philippines still, but I'm in the midst of work chaos and have had to take a break. We had evaluations (read: report cards), monthly lesson plans, end of the month exams all due at the same time (again, they really never learn). Plus, today was "Market Day", which was a special event -- the children have been earning 'money' for a little while, and today was the shopping day. As of yesterday at 6:00 absolutely nothing was planned, despite the foreign staff having asked many times what was happening. This morning was chaos, or as Suzanne likes to say - "a gong show". To add kerosene to my already burning nerves, I have been given the gift of 5 new students (4 of whom came today, the other one will be back tomorrow) whose level of English is about 6 months behind what my kids are capable of. I'm a little stressed out.

So you will understand why I found the following so amusing. Lest you think I am merely corrupting the minds of Korea's youth, I will give a bit of backstory. I have been teaching the "Summer Intensive" class for the past month. It consists of 4 students with extremely low English ability. One of them is a boy named Dan, who actually has been going to our Hagwan for several months, but he is a brat (to put it nicely) and spends pretty much every class yelling at me in Korean. The other kids are constantly trying to explain to him that I have no idea what he's saying, but he doesn't care. It's doubly frustrating because I know he knows some key phrases in English like "Bathroom please" and "Water please", but he refuses to use them. It not only frustrates me, it frustrates the other students, especially the oldest girl named Judy, who I'm fairly sure cursed him out in Korean on Friday. (She turned to him and in the coldest, nastiest tone I'd ever heard come out of her mouth let fly a stream of unpleasant sounding Korean words, and then turned to me and went beet red.) Anyway, yesterday he was being particularly frustrating and she turned to him and managed to put together what I think was a brilliant English sentence for someone who has only been learning English for about a month or so. What she said was this: "Dan, are you alcohol drinking, a lot?"

I burst out laughing, and then decided that as an educator, it was my duty to teach her how to use that expression properly.


After that, I taught the entire class how to say it. Because it's important.


I had some pictures from today to post as well, but blogger is deciding to be annoying so you will have to wait for those. But I thought you'd enjoy the movies so... hope you did.