Yesterday morning, I predicted I would have a hectic week. In fact, yesterday was more than hectic – yesterday was downright insane. My coworker Grace failed to return from her vacation as scheduled (maybe an airplane travel problem? I wasn't clear on the situation). But her substitute teacher was no longer available. We had no teacher for 6 classes, and about 30 minutes to adapt.
So Curt shuffled the schedule, combined some classes, and we made it through. I had a full schedule, needless to say. 8 classes, straight through, no breaks.
For the combined and non-standard classes, mostly I taught non-standard lessons. I'm pretty good at ad-hocing it. So it went OK. I had one combined class with 20 students, though – which is HUGE by hagwon standards. I haven't faced a class that large since I taught at the public school down south in 2011. They were the younger kids. We played bingo. It went smoothly.
Several hilarious student anecdotes eventuated.
I was giving a planned, really hard month-end essay writing test to my ED1 cohort, but being a bit frazzled, I wasn't being very sympathetic or helpful to my poor students.
A boy named Sean, who never pays attention, looked up in the middle of the test, and asked, "What's a film festival?" Perhaps that seems innocent enough – a gap in vocabulary, no more. However, in fact we had been reading, brainstorming, discussing, and trying to write essays about film festivals for the past month. The core of the test, in fact, was to write an essay about an imaginary film festival, for which I gave some made-up details (location, schedule, etc.). So this was a rather glaring gap. Rather than try to help the boy, I just started laughing. I think the students were disturbed by this performance.
I laughed so hard I nearly cried.
Later, in one of Grace's speaking classes, I asked a 6th grade boy named Kai if he was in any clubs. We had been discussing clubs such as a taekwondo club, computer club, chess club, or that kind of thing.
Without missing a beat, he said, "I'm in the night club. Every night." He mimed a disco dance move. Where did that come from? I laughed again. That might seem like a pretty clever pun for a non-native speaker. Actually, it makes a bit of sense. "Club" is a borrowed word from English to Korean (클럽 [keulleop]), but only in the "night club" meaning – thus that's the central meaning for Koreans, rather than what we think of as its main sense, which is just a social organization of some kind.
[daily log: walking, 7km]