10 AM:
My H-Sol class is cancelled because we're having it tomorrow. It will be an open class, but the parents will probably only be there for 5 minutes in the middle of class. I'm trying to be chill, and I really do feel mostly-chill about it.
Yesterday, NG tried this new thing where he played the kids in 2-7, 2-8 an English factual video and told them what the facts meant. It took about 10 minutes, and while he was talking I noticed that the kids only pay slightly more attention to him than to me. Even when it's all Korean, explaining a few English words here and there, they still don't focus.
So I started circulating in the room, turning heads back toward NG, stopping leg-wrestling matches, and confiscating objects.
The Confiscated-Object Haul:
3 volumes of manhwa (comic books), 2 plastic-encased decks of Yugioh trading cards, a yellow handtowel that was being used to thwack people on the head, a basketball, and a long silver tube that looked like it might have once been part of a vacuum cleaner.
Seriously.
After the 5th confiscation, the babies generally got the idea that I'd be taking all their stuff if they produced it, so they calmed down and started listening. By the end, most of the kids were paying attention, or at the very least they were quiet. Score! And they don't much mind having their stuff taken. I put it on a desk at the front of the classroom and they can get it after class.
My Yunho was in fine form. In the back of the room, he kept staring at me and feigning a theatrical "angry" face for unknown reasons. He pounded his fist on his desk one time and looked fierce. I was standing at the front near NG, so I didn't want to yell out to Yunho to stop, so I just smiled at him. Smiles did not melt his theater-anger, so I finally did a sad pouty-face, which made him crack up. He was so delighted, he proceeded to spend the rest of class trying to coax the pouty-face from me again.
Now I know the key to getting Yunho to do anything--aegyo.
This morning, Soonhyuk begged for The Hunger Games and I told him we'd watch it if we finished our speaking early. We did. Soonhyuk memorized his dialogue perfectly and he also answered about 15 soccer questions perfectly. My smart boy. I love him so. And to think that he wasn't even on my radar until last December, and then only because of his hyung Sooncheonie.
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5 PM : Finally got some information on the best Korean soccer players. The kids don't really know their own national team, so I tried to do internet research and was having trouble figuring out which players on the roster might be the most interesting ones to make quizzes about.
Then I realized I'd just been asking the wrong kids. On the walk home, I stopped my Yeonghan to get him to tell me the best 2 Korean soccer players and he wrote down the very two names I'd seen most often in online articles. Score.
So next week, I'll do two videos of Korean players, which the kids should connect to pretty well.
In the Triple Class, I had to keep going to the mic to tell them to be quiet, but they did quiet down every time. And they got so used to me saying, "Be quiet, be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet. be quiet. Thank you." That they would join in and chorus sweetly, "Thank youuu," along with me. It was the single cutest thing the Triple Class has done.
During one of the breaks, Inha, B-Jeongmin, Yeongchang, and Myeongjong all came into the office, scratching their arms madly, begging me for medicine. They had happened upon a patch of poison ivy and, I dunno, rolled in it or something.
Oookey. How to handle this? I told them to go to the nurse's office. The office was locked up, they said, still scratching. I knew this to be true because there was a teacher meeting and the nurse told me I coudn't nap in the office because she had to lock it up.
Due to said meeting, there were no Korean teachers in the office, so next we looked for the 1st aid kit. Except the boys didn't know where it was and I had never seen it, not even once. Zip, zilch, nada. So they exited the room, still itching and hopping like mad. Poor babies. They did eventually get sprayed down with medicine when the teachers got bad from their meeting, but lets just say they'll think twice about doing anything adventurous during meeting times, when no one with Korean ability can help them.
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