teaching = bribery

it rained off and on all day friday. for lunch i had my favorite bulgalge, which is a beef and onion soup. i think i actually wrote about it before. its so good. for now on its going to be my friday lunch.

classes today went really well. all week sally was telling me about how she is going to be singing at her school on friday. today during class i asked her to sing for me. she didn't want to because she said i didn't know korean. i told her that music is universal and that it didn't matter. she still shook her head. then i told her that if she sang for me there would be no reading today. as she sat there i could see the wheels in her head spinning. yes, i've resorted to bribery. she then told me that the song was about a chick that cried one tear and the the title was called clover. with that she started to hum it. i asked if there were any words. she said yes and began to sing the first verse. it was too damn cute. her performance today reinforces what i've been thinking for awhile now. she's a little adriana. no wonder i love her so much. she's got that same sassy attitude, good voice, and every time she tells me a story she makes me laugh. i love going to this class for that reason. its like have a little bit of home here in korea. now if i could only get the two of them in the same room. how wonderful would that be.

the bribery theme carried on into my class of boys. i told them today that i was going to have a point system. during our lessons they needed to raise their hand and wait to be called on. if they got the answer correct they got a point. if they started to misbehave i'd take a point away. at the end of class whoever had the most points got a prize. i must say it actually worked. this was the best behaved they've been so far. at the beginning of class i gave them a spelling test. not so good. the highest grade was a 50. we're definitely going to have to work on spelling. after finishing our lesson i gave them a handout on body parts and they had to spell out the different parts. we played it sort of like hangman. where the beginning letter was given to them and then they had to figure out the rest. they seemed to have fun with it which made me happy. it's so much more enjoyable when classes go well.

in tae kwon do we had to do the leap frog again. i told master shin that i didn't feel comfortable doing it since this was how i injured myself to begin with. he was cool with that and made me be the obstacle they jumped over. after the warmup exercises we practiced forms. there are 8 forms we need to learn to get various belts. i'm still on form 1. it was actually a good class. i know about 95% of form one. one step closer to a yellow belt. maybe by december i can trade in my white belt for the yellow one.

gotta motor. until next time…