Christmas is Coming

For those of you who have looked at my previous post, you may have noticed that it has no text. I have no idea why; I published it with words but somehow they disappeared. So I will add the words back in another time... the jist of the story was that I went to Seoul with my Korean friend Sue, who has recently started working in the office at our school, and she took me to a palace, a man-made stream, Insadong, and then to dinner with her older brother and sister, who know friends of mine who were here before.

This last week before Christmas break has been insane. Tuesday night the elementary Christmas program took place at the Pyeongtaek youth center building, and I must say I am very glad I do not teach elementary school! I was fortunate enough to just help with the bake sale instead of corralling little kids all night. The Christmas program was not anything spectacular, but it was funny to hear kids who do not speak much English trying to say their lines. They did a good job with it.

On Thursday, I taught Christmas songs to all my Spanish classes, and then made them walk through all the hallways in the school caroling to all the classes and office staff. We all had fun with it, and their enthusiasm made up for the fact that they were off-key half the time!

Of course on Friday, not much was accomplished apart from eating, eating, singing, and eating. Because two of the seventh graders are leaving the country after Christmas, the whole class spent a couple hours yesterday making a hilarious video of "A Typical Day in the Seventh Grade," which featured all of their bad habits in class such as falling asleep, underwear showing, combing hair, looking at pictures of music stars instead of the book, falling out of their chairs, climbing in lockers, etc. They actually had a really good plot about one kid getting picked on and ignored (which doesn't happen to that kid in real life), so he prays in a locker and in the boys bathroom (yes, they filmed in there), and then the other kids decide they had done wrong and apologized to him, before falling out of their chairs again. They talked me into doing all their video editing for them, and it ended up being a really good movie. We showed it to the whole secondary school during lunch. Here are a couple pictures of some of the kids in that class:

Now school has wonderfully ended for three weeks, so I will have lots of time to celebrate Christmas!