12 PM: Sweet night.
It's my first break all day--I had 3 classes in a row, which is unheard of because it's nearly unsustainable to direct that many children for that long. But it went fine. I did okay with 2-3, 2-4, then 1-1, 1-2 were charming little babies (Minsang brought mango-flavored chocolates to give to everyone SO SWEET, both literally and metaphorically.
And 3-7, 3-8 is a class of merry pranksters. They had lots of fun and I had fun laughing at their antics. BH's friend Shion, who I used to think disliked me, is always making jokes with me and tapping on my fingers when I'm near his desk, so we've become good friends.
In 2-3, 2-4, I noticed that Gunwoo wants to be loved. He's always been a hard case, almost totally apathetic, and the kind of kid who hangs out with other apathetic ones. But I knew him to be smart. Today, I noticed he was making the same "hey look at me" sounds and flounces that Soonhyuk does when he's not getting enough attention.
Was it possible that Gunwoo wanted to be talked to? Yep. Double yep. I did his memorized dialogue for him, then I sat by him and worked with him on his paper. He was intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting in all his questions. When we finished, he tossed his paper toward the window like it wasn't important, but I gathered it up and said it was important to me, and put it in my textbook. The other boys all went "ooh," and Gunwoo smiled, so that was definitely the right thing to do. Gunwoo's gonna be my boy from here onward.
Got to conserve energy. Because I just opened a League of Legends account for online gaming, and the boys will want to come by at lunch and offer me 40 billion tidbits of advice. My playing their favorite game is the most exciting thing to happen to the 3rd-graders since the Ice Bucket Challenge craze of August.
After lunch, I've got the giant class twice in a row. hahahaha. Five classes on a Friday. And it ends on a double-giant class. But! On the other side of that is my vacation! For the Chuseok holiday, I'm vacationing on a Korean island with my roommate from teacher orientation, and we're going to see and enjoy and relax wondrously for 4 days. :-)
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4 PM Holy moly. Well, double giant class was some kind of thing.
We survived. The babies did some stuff. NG and I learned some coping strategies. First, we can play them more videos. If they're interested in learning facts about plants or animals, we look up videos about those things.
The first thing he said when I came in for our marathon class was "we can take it slow," and that was a good mindset to have. We just moved glacier-slow from one activity to another, with no strong impulse to get them all involved or to get even 50% energy. It's the only way to keep from nearly passing out from tiredness after two such classes.
I didn't try to get any sort of quietness, even though it got so loud I couldn't think. And considering my supremely high noise tolerance, that's pretty doggone loud. Then NG got serious with their discipline in a way that he never has before--I think he literally hit every kid with the stick, the little one which stings mightily, not the big which is mostly for noise.
They were silent as a ghost town while I did speaking practice with pairs. It was kind of scary. I felt bad that he had to go to that kind of level to make them quiet, but if it's what we have to do to maintain peace, maybe it's for the best.
Anyhoodle, I kept a loving attitude toward the babies, so I did my part I believe.
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