Ouvrir une classe avec un Jacque.
So I guess I've been procrastinating with writing a new post because I don't want to see that beautiful aquamarine tropical water in the previous entry disappear beneath new entries.
I guess I'll have to post sometime though. I was hoping it could wait until the day the local galbi restaurant handed over their keys and said "Here, we want you to have sole proprietership, including access to the secrets behind our recipes, particularly the onion salad and galbi marinade." Or perhaps the day all our students decided to go on strike, and made the picket line a neat little circle around South East asia so that we'd be forced to take refuge there and eat Thom Yam soup all day.
Alas, the galbi restaurant seems content without foreign ownership and the kids seem to prefer displaying their anarchism by stealing my precious stickyballs instead.
Today I opened a 14 kid class. I was a bit apprehensive, considering I had never had a 14-kid class before, let alone opened one (the largest classes at our school have been, up until today, 13 students). I do have a couple 13 student classes, but who's to say that one extra kid won't topple the fragile class ecosystem over like a teetering Jenga castle?
Fortunately that one extra kid did no harm.
Opening classes is kind of like doing a 25 mintute stand-up comedy act in a room full of Easter island moai.. Behind the baby-statues sit equally grim mother and father statues, lips pressed tightly as they seek to ensure their fledglings are absorbing the highest quota of West Germanic Indo-European language possible. As they quietly text-message their cousins' brothers, once removed, with frequent updates re: the performance, you sashay around like a spineless scarecrow, chanting 'put your tongue in, put your tongue out, put your tongue in, and shake it all about,' then hokey pokey like it's the coolest fad ever to hit Asia.
Another cool thing about opening classes is getting to name the kids. They all have Korean names of course, but their new English names will (usually) also stick with them for the rest of their lives. This humbling sense of permanency has lead certain other teachers at my school (ahem, names withheld) to name their classes after the Justice League, or certain sports teams. Luckily for my mini moai, I went primarily with names of friends and family.
So now we have a mini Joanna, Julian, Janet, Jennifer, Jacque and Katherine amongst others (Not to mention a Jared and Ross who reside in a friend's new class from last week). I even named one after an ex bf (I liked his name.. and that's about it) and a character off Lost, the TV show I still recommend very, very highly. In fact, time to go watch it right now.
I guess I'll have to post sometime though. I was hoping it could wait until the day the local galbi restaurant handed over their keys and said "Here, we want you to have sole proprietership, including access to the secrets behind our recipes, particularly the onion salad and galbi marinade." Or perhaps the day all our students decided to go on strike, and made the picket line a neat little circle around South East asia so that we'd be forced to take refuge there and eat Thom Yam soup all day.
Alas, the galbi restaurant seems content without foreign ownership and the kids seem to prefer displaying their anarchism by stealing my precious stickyballs instead.
Today I opened a 14 kid class. I was a bit apprehensive, considering I had never had a 14-kid class before, let alone opened one (the largest classes at our school have been, up until today, 13 students). I do have a couple 13 student classes, but who's to say that one extra kid won't topple the fragile class ecosystem over like a teetering Jenga castle?
Fortunately that one extra kid did no harm.
Opening classes is kind of like doing a 25 mintute stand-up comedy act in a room full of Easter island moai.. Behind the baby-statues sit equally grim mother and father statues, lips pressed tightly as they seek to ensure their fledglings are absorbing the highest quota of West Germanic Indo-European language possible. As they quietly text-message their cousins' brothers, once removed, with frequent updates re: the performance, you sashay around like a spineless scarecrow, chanting 'put your tongue in, put your tongue out, put your tongue in, and shake it all about,' then hokey pokey like it's the coolest fad ever to hit Asia.
Another cool thing about opening classes is getting to name the kids. They all have Korean names of course, but their new English names will (usually) also stick with them for the rest of their lives. This humbling sense of permanency has lead certain other teachers at my school (ahem, names withheld) to name their classes after the Justice League, or certain sports teams. Luckily for my mini moai, I went primarily with names of friends and family.
So now we have a mini Joanna, Julian, Janet, Jennifer, Jacque and Katherine amongst others (Not to mention a Jared and Ross who reside in a friend's new class from last week). I even named one after an ex bf (I liked his name.. and that's about it) and a character off Lost, the TV show I still recommend very, very highly. In fact, time to go watch it right now.
posted by s at 4:44 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home