Pretty relaxed right now after a not-so strenious day. Made some delicious dinner, cleaned up the apartment, and now I'm enjoying some forwarded pictures from my cousin Jenny's wedding this past weekend in Santa Barbra! I heard it was beautiful and I'm sorry I couldn't make it but the few pictures I have seen from the day it all looked amazing!
Can't ask for a more chill evening right?! As far as my work day went, on Thursdays I come in at about 2pm, have one class, a break, then two classes back to back and then I'M OUT by 6! Don't get me wrong, I still need a lot of coffee...
First is a decent mid-level class with four boys and one girl. They think it's hilarious to try and bar me from getting in to the class, so today this is what greeted me at the door:
They got creative and put their chairs in front of the door today as a nice added touch.
Then I have my class with the 3 year olds. Below is Johnathan, who is one of two boys and a troublemaker most of the time but he also makes an effort to learn some words and follows instructions decently. He has been known, however, on occasion to spit at things/people. Looks pretty calm here right? He was making a b-line for the door to leave so I busted out my camera phone to distract him, which he stole and ran around the room with. Distraction: success.
Above is Diane in the foreground, with Joan in the background. Diane is literally the perfect student. Smart, I taught her a full sentence today, and she follows (coloring) instructions very well. On top of that one of the boys took Joan's colored pencils once and Joan was too shy to do anything so, as I watched, Diane went over to the boy took his pencils, gave him a death stare, walked back to Joan and returned the property. The boy didn't dare disagree. From then on Diane has been like family. Joan is what I call perma-cute. First off, she says Go-ann instead of Joan which is too cute, but also she ceases to be adorable. For example today I walked down the hallway before class and she was against the wall, softly crying (I think because her Mom didn't come with her for the first time to school), when I knelt down to ask her what was wrong she turned away embarrassed, but the she realized that her Mom had packed me a frappuccino for me in her backpack and with in seconds she was tearing open her backpack and giggling again, just happy to give me a gift.
Understandably the kids in that class don't understand English. In fact, they don't understand that I don't know Korean. So I have no real way to communicate so it usually 40 min of combined coloring and me with hand puppets running around the room making silly voices. Which is fine with me.
The the next class I've talked about before, with Rose and Jewelry. Those twins are no longer in the class, but when the class first started the kids were very reserved and quite so I acted ridiclious to get them to open up and now three months later they still expect the same level of wackiness.
On top of that my Korean co-teacher for the class said last week that the Moms of the kids were concerned that the school was focusing on academics too much so she told me in that class to just focus mostly on entertaining the kids to make sure they have fun and love school instead of doing a lot of work. So there's an hour and a half of two classes where I go non-stop clown. These two pictures taken by students pretty much sum up Matt from 4-5:30 on Thursdays:
OH, but some great news. It is Teacher's Day on the 15th of this month and since that's a Sunday I got a few gifts today for the occasion! The aforementioned coffee from Joan's mom, and then one of the homerooms, Duke, the Mom's all pitched in and got the four teachers who have classes with that homeroom a tin full of Vitamin C packets (extremely popular here), AND a $50 gift card.
Above is my desk: my ever present cup of coffee, the tin of 100 or something vitamin packets, and the gift card. Here's what the card said:
How AWESOME.
I've spent about 3 hours on the phone(Skype) this week getting my finances in order back home so where as a younger me (say, 24) would have spent a greater portion of that gift card on various 'fun' things, I went to the supermarket after work and bought food, a new dish sponge, and a new short-sleeved shirt dress shirt for the hot summer days ahead. Super adulty huh? I almost feel asleep just shopping for such things. I did splurge and get a dollar-fifty garlic press, so you know, I still live on the wild side some times.
No plans for this weekend. We'll talk again soon!
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