Backgrounds, Bombardments, and Baking Soda

This is the picture I have as my background on my computer now. I took it last winter in Morocco, and it's one of those pictures that the more you look at, the more you see. It's random yes, but who knows, maybe I'll go back and visit Morocco again someday, and I haven't taken any good pictures here recently.

Progress reports went out this week at school, which means my desk has been constantly bombarded with herds of kids demanding to know why they received their grade and complaining that it's not fair. Come on, people, do you really think that if you don't turn in your work you won't lose any points? Welcome to the real world. And as 93 is still an A. What are they going to do when actual report cards go out? Asians, especially Koreans, are very paranoid about their grades. Mainly because their parents are paranoid about their grades. This whole week was crazy since I just got the grading program on my computer last Thursday afternoon, so I had like 24 hours to enter in all my grades for 6 weeks of school. But since the computer in my classroom didn't work, they finally gave me a new one. So for a while, I have the most powerful computer in the school (until they install the other one they got to run the main server off of). Sweet.

So I basically spent the week grading. But I came across a few humourous assignments kids had turned in. Here are some of my favorite quotes.

Dear theacher Im ben this is so heard I cried hear [arrow drawn to question at
the top of the page] so please have merse on me.

Q: Would you have rather lived in ancient Greece or ancient Rome?
A: No because is not fun!! and all the girls is ugly!! and many war.

Girls have to sew, learn mannors, catch flees, sew again, and then get married
to a man they don't love and have a terrible life.

The top one is my all-time favorite, although catching fleas comes close. Before you feel too bad for the kid, the odds of him crying over any homework are slim to none and he's pretty dramatic. (But yes, I did show a little merse because he actually did his work for once.)

Tuesday night the female teachers got together to eat cookies and watch a movie. We were going to make cookies together, but that would have been too hard with the lack of ovens. So the few people that have ovens made them at home and brought them. Some of them were kind of interesting... you can't get all the ingredients for cookies here, and some girls didn't have any recipes anyway, so they just combined some random ingredients together and baked them for a while. We had these peanut butter-ish ones that tasted good until you got this strong baking soda aftertaste bubbling in your throat... ha. Attempts to make American food may or may not succeed.

I haven't done anything exciting lately. I'll write more when something happens.