Elephant Class

Today I have decided to explain Elephant Class. Elephant Class is on the third floor, and they are 6 years old. Technically, they are the lower level 6 year olds, but we have found that Elephant and Zebra are pretty much the same as far as English goes. Jeff is the kid in class who is either very happy or coming down from a hyper episode and is crying. He loves games, but hates losing. He also loves to work ahead in his workbook and "hide" pencils from me. Sarah doesn't speak so much as whimper? I guess that's how to explain it. Maybe grunt? She rarely uses words without being asked to use them. She loves to be touching teacher and she too loves to try to hide pencils. Julie is a sweetheart. She speaks English very well and last week, she started wearing hot pink glasses. The kicker? There are no lenses. Just bright pink frames. She does not like to share those. Jinny speaks the best English when she is in a good mood. Often times she is angry at someone and refuses to speak at all. She has great handwriting and is able to complete worksheets on her own, which is a big deal across the board. Kevin is my favorite boy at school. Shhh. He's very smart, he's very funny, and he's adorable. He has a weird southern accent going when he says words like pen, ten, and hen. It's strange. Finally, there is Dora. Dora is a nut. She speaks English very well but is very slow and easily distracted. I'll say "Dora, write your name please" and she says "look teacher, I'm a frog" then proceeds to bounce around the room making frog sounds. She also gets bloody noses a lot and falls over a lot, due to the hopping probably.

This was a pretty good week at school. The kids have all been speaking much more English, and thing are going well. I have been working on getting all the paper work together to extend my Visa. It's a pain in the ass, but it's going. I hope. Friday night I went to dinner at a Chinese place. That was delicious. Then did Underground and once again ended up closing the bar. Came home at 6 am Saturday. Woke up, ate a little and played movie drinking games with Ian all day. Went to bed pretty early but was awake from 3-5 and 6-9 hunting for two mosquitoes that were destroying my life. I have never seen mosquitoes outside, only in my house waiting for me to go to sleep. It's terrible. And, it's been below freezing a lot, so I don't know why they are not dead yet. But I'm really over waking up with an eye swollen shut and really itchy feet. Real over it.

Thusday, November 11th is Veterans Day in America, yes? Well, in Korea it is Pepero Day. What is Pepero? I'll tell you. It is a graham-cracker/pretzel like cookie stick that is coated in chocolate and sometimes nuts. You can usually buy packs of them for like 40 cents. Each one is about the size of a number 2 pencil. But for Pepero Day, you can buy giant ones, that are the size of those old crayola piggy banks, you can buy huge gift baskets of them, and you can buy teddy bears holding a bouquet of them. Sadly, it is not a school vacation day. I'm thinking that oreo is really missing out on something great here. The kids talked about Pepero Day for weeks and we got a lot of boxes of cookies. Pretty neat, I think.

Nothing big planned for the next while. I think we finally got a room for the Thailand trip, so that's exciting. Obviously we have to work on Thanksgiving, and luckily we have a workshop to go to that Saturday. So I think that next weekend, Jason, Sophia, and I are going to host some sort of Thanksgiving/Football party. However when we were trying to decide who to invite, we realized that we are really the only Americans we hang out with. A majority of our friends (who aren't Korean) are Canadian, South African, British, Irish, Scottish, or Australian. I guess it's a good thing, but it makes Thanksgiving less cool.

Hope everything is going well at home. I miss you a lot. I miss home. Someday I'll do a post about things I miss and things I do not miss. Not right now. Let me know if anything exciting is happening!! KISSES!

Jeff

Sarah as an Alien

Alien Julie.

Princess Jinny

Kevin

Alien Dora