Christmas Dinner 2009

I ate Christmas dinner in Korea with friends. Fortunately they have an oven, so we cooked two chickens (big ovens, like big chickens, are difficult to come by in Korea). Good company and good food!:)

Boy Words

I was teaching some of my 5th grade boys last week when a certain English phrase I said set them to laughing. I give them a lot of credit--they hid it at first; they attempted to be polite. But, boys being boys, they couldn't hold it in, especially as the situation demanded that I repeat the phrase several times.

It turns out that the sound of this phrase--one quarter, as in 1/4-- is close to the sound of a Korean term for an impolite body word--bugger, as in nose trash. (Looking back, the students asked me to repeat and to pronounce the phrase in different ways--I am not sure if this was for language learning or merely for their pleasure . . .).

It's not the first time this has happened, and probably not the last. Sometimes sounds in different languages meet at a crossroads, the meanings going in opposite directions.

Ah, the unexpected joys of teaching ESL . . .

Whiteboard Pics

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, especially in my classroom . . ."

Or so some lyrics might go:)

New South Korean $50 Bill

Ok, clearly it's not $50 . . . it's W50,000. 50,000 won. Right now it's not worth as much as $50 due to the exchange rate, but that is beside the point.

The point is that Korea has a "big money" bill. A large banknote.

"Large?" you ask.

"Yes, large!" I say.

For, prior to this ("this" being the past few months), Korea only had the equivalent of $1, $5, and $10 bills.

If you needed a significant sum of money it resulted in a big wad of bills.

Now that wad is smaller.

Hooray smaller wads!

Snowing

It's snowing in Seoul . . . as it has a few times, but no sticking so far this winter. The flakes outside my window are blowing sideways and up more than down (it's windy today). . .

Another Laughing Class

I have one class that has just a few students in it, and, as I mentioned to my boss the other day, they should be taken to a hospital to cheer up sick people. Why? Because they are perpetually happy. I take absolutely no credit for the situation; they are just wonderful kids.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Far from it.

These kids (2-3 grade) cheer me up and keep me guessing.

I started a long time ago (it seems now) teaching most of my young elementary students to write the date and the weather ("Today is Sunday, November 29th, 2009. It's cloudy and cold.") in their notebooks after I had written the sentences on the whiteboard (wb). This is useful in multiple ways: talking about days, months, weather, capitalization, punctuation, etc.

In a few classes, as is my practice, I began--once I had trained them to copy these two lines--to have individual students write the lines (to be copied by everyone) on the wb. I say, for example, "Ann, please write on the whiteboard 'Today is . . .' " and it's done, with a little help. They often compete to see who gets to write.

Back to the 'happy' kids.

I taught them to do this--to write the day and the weather on the board--but instead of one student writing it on the wb and the rest writing in their notebooks, they somehow got it in their heads that all of them should write it on the wb.

So, usually, even before I get into the classroom, they start writing on the wb. Writing and laughing.

Why are they laughing? They are friends. They like each other. And, they get silly with the English language.

Picture this: Three students writing the day/weather on the whiteboard: one student is writing letters as big as possible, another student is writing letters as small as possible, and the third student is writing the letters backwards. Or skipping every other letter. (ie, things I would find hard to do as a native speaker).

Again, formal education would speak up and say, "Sit down! Open your notebooks and write . . .". That's what I used to do not even a few years ago. Teacher must be in control.

These happy kids, these laughing kids, are having so much fun--and, in the process, learning so much more--that my previous pedagogy, my prior beliefs and practices, would be a shame.

I wish that all of my students/classes presented the same "problem".

Thanksgiving Week

I remember a time, long ago ('o how these bones ache), when I went hunting with my friend up around Helena, Montana. We were both university students at the time and needed some food, a freezer full of deer meat.

One of my memories of that experience--hiking around in deep snow in freezing weather in the beautiful Montana outdoors--is of the lunch my friend's mom packed for us, in brown paper bags, no less, as if we were schoolboys. Wheat-grain bread with peanut butter and honey . . . let me tell you, that is really great after hiking around in the snow all day.

The other memory is mostly a bad one, but funny now. I had forgotten a can of soda in my friend's car. Oops. It froze overnight and exploded. We didn't know it until we were on the way back to university in Bozeman. Once the vehicle warmed up the previously-frozen soda drops that had adhered to the interior of his 4WD started dripping on us . . .

Ahh . . . amid all of the stupid, bad things in life, it is good to still have some wonderful memories to reflect on. And hopefully some new ones to make . . .