7 AM: I am as sleepy as a Very Sleepy Thing.
But I have my 4-hour Saturday thing to prepare for, followed by actually doing it. On the upside, I've been listening to praise and worship music this morning, and it has uplifted me mentally even if I'm dragging a bit, physically ("Shout to the Lord" works wonders for attitude). I can pull things together for a few hours for these students, who I'm eager to see.
At the very least, we will all get to know each other today. I love these kids a little bit already, so I fully expect that feeling to be further cemented by being around them more.
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5:45 PM: So the kids I thought I was teaching, I was not teaching. Except that I was, but not until later. It wasn't Main Co-Teacher's fault, but no matter how many times it was explained to me, I couldn't understand that I was teaching boy and girl 1st-graders in Room 1-10 for the first two class periods, then teaching the boy and girl 2nd-graders for the next two class periods. I actually moved half of my 1st-graders upstairs before understanding that only I personally was moving upstairs.
It was awful. Like, I don't think anybody learned anything. I made a special trip to buy The Hobbit, but I forgot how boring certain early parts of The Hobbit are. I tried to balance it out by writing on the blackboard, talking about story elements like "fantasy" and "epic" and "problem" and "solution". Some of them were sort of interested in the movie, and some were sort-of interested in the story elements I had written. But right when I was going to stop the movie so we could do a writing project, writing our own fantasy stories with fun heroes and big villains, I discovered that I had to switch rooms and switch students! So we did nothing but watch the boring part of an English movie. Strike out.
Upstairs, things went better. I had only 7 students--four of my favorite boys and 3 darling girls. The boys had seen The Hobbit and the girls had not, so I got to talk to the boys more about the role of heroes and how Bilbo is a small, weak, boring person, so that's why he is an interesting hero.
One of my boys, HH, also commented that English fantasy stories always have dragons in them. Genius. I wrote on the board that this was because the very first English-language story, Beowulf, has a dragon in it, so ever since Beowulf, English story-writers have this impulse to put dragons in their stories. The boys said old Korean stories are full of ghosts and tigers.
The story-writing in this class went better. The girls wrote in a team and the boys wrote in a team, and we were all shouting at each other about what to write. The boys were nearly coming to punches over which direction their story should take as I was writing it down for them, so I was happy that they were so invested in their choices.
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9:30 PM: The reason Saturday-Jeongmin is the best is because he helped me get the video files going, both downstairs and upstairs. I had a Bad Teaching Day, but without Jeongmin's help I would have had a Miserable Teaching Day.
I don't know how to explain to him how grateful I am for his help. On a morning where I was sleepy and thoroughly confused about where I was supposed to be teaching and who and for how long, when I was staring at 16 unfamiliar 1st-grade faces when I thought I'd be with my favorite 2nd-graders, Saturday-Jeongmin was the only child I knew. The school was all but empty and I had nobody to turn to, but Jeongmin stood by me at the computer and found solutions for my technical problems.
During the 1st-graders' class, I didn't even try to keep the kids from using their phones because I had nothing better for them to do--just a film to watch and a writing exercise at the end which we didn't get to do. But I went over to five of the boys and started playing the word game I had worked on with Taehoon, where they write a word in English, then I try to write it in Korean. These boys had the advantage because they quickly moved past words I knew, like "book" and onto words like "storm" and "product," which I could not write.
Then we wrote a story in English about a dragon, writing one sentence each. I couldn't keep their attention for longer than that, but it was okay because 2 girls got so curious about what I was doing with the boys, they pulled up desks and chairs so I could write with them. The girls, Jeongin and Choongeun, were precious and we also played the English Word-Korean Word game, before writing a killer story.
In the story I wrote with Jeongin and Choongeon, a girl finds a magic book and a real unicorn with wings comes out of the book. The girl rides the unicorn into the sky, but a dragon comes out of the book to attack them! The girl uses a wand to fight the dragon for hours, until finally she shrinks him down and makes him small. The girl likes birds, so she puts the tiny dragon in a cage and keeps him as a tame pet, like a bird. This story is mostly Jeongin and Choongeun's doing--I only provided direction. We sat together for 40 minutes, doing this while the movie played. Everyone else was left hanging out to dry, but two girls felt totally adored.
I think Saturday-Jeongmin felt left out, too. I took the kids out for a walk down the hallway really quickly, just to stretch their legs, and I struck up a conversation with 2 other girls about an English book they were reading, translated into Korean. Jeongmin came up beside me in the hallway to discuss the book too, and to explain that he had read it in Korean and was now reading it in English. I was struggling to read the first Korean sentence from the book, and he rattled off the whole thing really fast, giving me translations along the way. Little show-off.
Also, I had written genre-related words on the white board, and when we got back from break, Jeongmin took a marker and started writing words about a movie he likes, writing the words slowly as he said them out loud, just like I do: "Teacher. Snowpiercer is a science-fiction movie. And it is also action. In America, I think you would think it is horror." I'm standing there, having an actual conversation about cross-genre films with a 13-year-old, and it's delightful, but I have to cut it short. Nooo!
Upstairs, with the 2nd-graders, I had my favorites Daehoon and HH, so it was a breeze. We wrote stories, and the boys were writing about a slime monster swallowing a boy's parents, but then he defeats the slime monster and his parents are released. The story was getting really violent, but when I left the boys to go work with the girls, I came back to find that the boy-story had taken a turn for romance--the slime monster had also swallowed Cinderella, so when the boy's parents came back to life, Cinderella came back, too, and she and the boy got married and lived happily ever after. The guys wrote this one. Awwwww.
Me and one of the 2nd-grade girls, Minji, got really close. Minji's got a great personality and brilliant English, and her story was grand. I'm hoping I get to talk with Minji again, soon.
I think I accidentally hurt HH's feelings. I was wrapping class up and I said that I'd have something better prepared for next month. I mentioned, "Teaching in America is very different." HH was quick to ask, "How is it different?" I stalled, saying, "It's....easier." -"Why? Is it because of the language? That makes it difficult?" I said no, it was easier to teach in America because I had more time to prepare for classes.
When I said that I taught differently in America, I was speaking out of insecurity; what I meant was, "Please don't think I'm awful at teaching. Back home, I was good at this." What HH heard was, "My American students were better than you, because at least they could understand what I say."
HH's amazing--he really is. He's a happy person, but he seems to pick up on any potential criticism, kind of like I do. I have to be careful that I don't say anything to slight him because he listens to every word, then examines the sentence to discern what you really mean, like a kid shaking a Christmas present to figure out what's on the inside.
He was the only student to get a joke I made at lunchtime. Co-Teacher brought us all these amazing bagged lunches from a local bakery, and I sat with my 7 kids, just chilling and listening to their adorable patter. They all argued really animatedly for five minutes about something, then the conversation hit a sudden lull. Like we were in a comedy movie, I immediately filled that one beat of quietness by saying, "Yeah, I didn't get any of that." It was a joke I made without thinking they would understand it, but HH was dying of laughter. He got the joke when no one else did, and I thought it was cool.
Daehoon also used the word "resurrection" properly in his story. Daehoon sparkles with inner beauty--he's just that sweet of a kid.
Before lunch, I stopped the kids and said I was going to pray for our food. I said a quick blessing, then found out the 5 of the 7 kids were raised Christian. We talked about blessings and prayers, and how/when you say them.
My mom reminded me that I don't just need to be a hip, "with-it" source of pop culture knowledge for these kids. It's so simple to just dazzle them with my knowledge of zombie movies and frothy pop songs, but that stuff is unimportant. Even teaching them English is unimportant when compared to the bigger task of showing them love, and then hopefully letting them know why I love them--because Jesus is in my heart, prompting me to do so. I still don't know how to get this final point across, but maybe I'll discover a way.
