Today's Lesson: Complete Annihilation

As previously mentioned, March 14th was White Day in Korea. As a result I received a respectable amount of delicious candy and chocolate from my students.















I ended up with two fancy boxes of chocolates, a whole tin of candies and a variety of other odds and ends. I love free snacks (although on Friday a kid gave me an obscene amount of peanut butter squid balls and while I appreciated the gesture, I would have been satisfied with one or two of them.). Oh and you can see my awesome flower pen in the background of the first picture. I love it so much even though it ran out of ink about 3 months. I can't bear to throw it away. Someone, please find me another one. Or a case of them.

So the candy/chocolate part of White Day was quite excellent. However, the major highlight of the day happened during kindergarten. You see, the lesson plans for all classes are already made for us. I am not entirely sure where they got them from or who made them, but generally they are okay. Occasionally they are puzzling, bizarre and slightly ridiculous. And right now with the tiny babies not knowing any English, a lot of the games and activities are a bit over their heads so we often have to improvise. Anyway, I've seen some strange activities in these plans but usually I can justify them. On Wednesday I was at a loss though. The plan for an entire 40 minute block of time? Give the children newspaper and let them tear it up and provide balloons for them to pop. WHAT?!? Please, someone tell me where the learning comes in? I guess we hadn't had a chance yet to teach them useful English words such as destruction, anarchy, chaos and annihilation but I was hoping we could save that for our lesson on the apocalypse.

Paige couldn't explain it either but we are good, faithful employees that strive to follow the lesson plans we are provided with. So we found some newspaper and blew up numerous balloons (I chose white ones in honor of White Day). Then we gathered all 11 of the children together and proceeded to hand out newspaper and demonstrate how to rip it up. You don't believe me? Pictures never lie!

After looking at us suspiciously and shyly tearing a few strips of paper they quickly got into it and destroyed the entire classroom.









It was a fun activity for the kids but I still can't figure out what educational purpose it was supposed to serve. And Jon just informed me that next week there is a lesson activity that says "Do anything with balloons". Here we go again.

Oh and a really funny (atleast to me) White Day story from one of my elementary classes. Now, these kids are my dream class- their English is quite good, they are all really curious and sweet and very well behaved. They always do their homework (ALWAYS) and 98% of the time they all get 100% on their (daily) spelling tests. So last Friday when we finished our lesson a bit early I taught them how to play Uno. Well these kids had never seen or heard of it before and they loved it. They are literally obsessed with this game now. So I told them if everyone got excellent all week on their spelling tests on Friday after we were finished the book questions we would play again. They have brought up that game a million times each class ever since. Then on White Day Julie pipes up with this gem, "Amber Teacher, last night, I (pause while she thought of the right words) talked to Jesus and and and ask please today a game!". I just about died (I did however teach her the verb to pray and corrected her sentence structure.). And then Linda pipes up, "Me too.". Their obsession is bordering unhealthy! Oh to be a kid again when the heaviest thing I need to pray about is playing Uno. So I chuckled a lot and then after everyone got 100% on the test and we finished the lesson I broke down and let them play again (which turned out to be good since on Friday 2 people got one word wrong and therefore I had to be a hard ass and we played nothing). I was pretty outdone though. (They also told me on Friday they would be praying over the weekend to play again on Monday. Look at me, inspiring and nurturing my students' spirituality.)

On a completely unrelated note, if you ever wondered which celebrities I am secretly related to now all of your suspicions can be officially confirmed! I have heard that this is 100% accurate. When I put in a different picture of me and one of my 7 year old students they matched him to Pharrell Williams. Impeccable! Uncanny! It has to be true!