Fun times at school

Seeing as they finished their English exam yesterday I thought it might be a good chance for them to just veg out this week and either enjoy or (more likely) fall asleep during a showing of Shrek. Good plan eh? Oh, wait, this is Korea. Literally one minute before class I get a message from my co-teacher saying that the vice-principal has said 'no DVDs'. Right, so I have 30 seconds to think of a 45 minute 'fun' lesson. I thought to myself, "my so called 'well planned' lessons aren't even that fun, so wtf am I going to do now?". This thought took up about 15 seconds of my prep-time. So I shuffled into class and pretended to be messing with the computer while I thought of something. "Right", I pondered, "maybe some kind of hangman gig? Or maybe bingo? Basic, but it might soak up some minutes...". So I bust out the 'Korean bingo' game that my girlfriend, Sarah, taught me.

Instructions are each student draws a grid however big the teacher tells them, lets say 4x4, and they have to think of 16 things in a given category. I chose 'brands', which took them forever! I was like 'do you kids just not watch TV or go shopping?'.. then I realised I was looking at Korean children whose sole purpose is to either study, read manga, or improve their skills at online games. Might've had more luck if I chose manga titles, which I will in the next lesson, or Starcraft build orders... Anyway, some kid managed to wangle two candies out of me by conveniently winning on his turn and then another kid guessed 'BRAZIL' correctly on the hangman game I busted out in the last 5 minutes. By the way, Korean kids don't really guess letters... they just guess one or two letters at the beginning then start throwing out whole words. For example, for _ _ A _ _ _ one girl guessed 'America'... It wasn't an advanced class.

This was second grade. Next up: my mental first grade class who stand on chairs and chant my name when I enter, who don't seem to know any English except 'give me candy', and who get so excited at the prospect of candy that they shout 'wrong!!' and jump up with their hand up screaming 'me! me!' when their classmates answer a question... even though the answer is right. And I've just said it's right.