So I finally set up a wifi network at the school, yesterday. I took my laptop to my classes, with varying results.
The school has an odd schedule on Wednesdays – I don’t teach till slightly later, and it’s the one day that I migrate into other classrooms besides #5 – which is sort of my homeroom. So I started with my 경기외고 cohort at 6.10, but I think this is too early relative to their normal Monday-Friday time, or something, so the class often fills up gradually over the 45 minute period: Richard and Jun Yeong always wander in around 6.20, and Fred (Mr Sleepy!) inevitably comes in, headphones blaring, with 15 minutes left in class.
So. Yesterday, there were only 5 girls at the start of class: Amy and Sunny (both named Da Hye, both very smart, but they have diametrically opposite personalities), along with Clara, Jenny and Jane (“Queen Jane of the wide grin and blank stare”). Oh, and Wayne (Ho Gyeong) was there – Wayne’s always there, trying to be invisible, but really quite smart, and the only student who’s doing two cohorts at once: he’s in the 경기외고 cohort for both MWF and TThSa.
Since I had my laptop, and with the reduced classroom population… although I hadn’t really planned on it, I decided it would be a good time to do something “different,” and so I played a few songs from my massive collection on my laptop (currently approximately 3300 songs – 100’s of ripped CD’s, plus what I’ve downloaded). I waited until something “clicked” and, perhaps not surprisingly, they seemed to like Lady Sovereign, a contemporary British rap artist whose recent album Public Warning I bought last spring.
So while they listened to her song “9-to-5” I ran to the office and printed out the lyrics (the internet is so cool – you can find the lyrics to any song in the known universe in a matter of seconds and have 15 copies spewing out of your printer).
So we had a fun time, running through the song again with the lyrics in front of us. Uh-oh, there’s a few bad words there – well, aren’t there always, with rap songs? But hey, that’s English too, right?
And on schedule, Richard (“Ricardo”) and Jun Yeong showed up, and Cristine and Becky came in (although Becky immediately fell asleep face-down on her wrist; and after some class discussion, we decided unanimously to let her continue her nap, having just heard a song by Lady Sovereign about the hazards of not getting enough sleep!). Fred (Mr. Sleepy!) never showed up at all, though I found him sleeping on one of the benches in the lobby of the school a little later.
These 경기외고 cohorts are my most most difficult, in some ways. They have the highest proportion of what I might term, diplomatically, as “differently-motivated” students. I’m not sure if listening to Lady Sovereign was any help or not, but it was a nice change of pace.
Another day in the life of “Jeredeu-Ticheo,” (this is Konglish: “Jared-Teacher” i.e. Jared-seonsaeng cf. parallel in Japanese: Jared-sensei) – I guess I’m still the “mediocre new guy” at Tomorrow Language School!
[Update: I added the youtube link 2011-08-03 as part of the background noise effort.]