Tired-ness

For some strange reason I am super duper unnaturally tired this week. Not just me, all the people at work seem to be suffering from the same sleepiness. Maybe its the below freezing temperatures, -3C today (and lets face it we - in Daegu - have it easy compared to the people in Seoul who were at -8 C today, and its supposed to get down to -10 C). Anyways, maybe its the cold or the fact that we're right smack in the middle of the winter intensives, which are extremely draining, but we're all pooped. And its only Tuesday. But in all honesty I do not have that much reason to complain (other than about the weather because i will totally continue to bitch about the fact that its 2o F here and 70 F in Miami, but that's neither here nor there).

Classes are actually going pretty well. And my mission to get these little Korean kids to use their imagination is working, on some of them at least. I had them write a story about an imaginary pet that they wanted to have, and I told them it could be anything. I for one decided to plagiarize JK Rowling and have a pet dragon named Norbert. A couple of the picked regular animals but there was also an alien, a dinosaur, and one girl just wrote about her online pet named Chiro (which I made the mistake of pronouncing Kiro, and was quickly told its pronounce Shihiro...ok???). But there's this one kid who insists on making lists. For two and a half weeks now he has not properly done homework for me once. I spend a substantial portion of my class talking to him, trying to get him to understand, and I send him home everyday with specific instructions, and still, everyday he comes back and he has the exact same thing as the day before. I really think I'm going to have to get Ashley teacher to call his mother and threaten him or something, cuz if he doesn't get it then he will have gotten nothing from my class.

On that note. Just the other day it hit me how uncommon it is for people in this culture to express, let alone write, their creative ideas. One of the more bright girls in my class, Jasmine, left her paper at home during the morning classes so I told her to bring it in during the evening classes since I see her 3 times a week in the evenings as well as 5 times a week in the mornings (she should be sick of me by now). When she brought it in, she had written one work in Korean because she did not know the English word for it. So, since I obviously speak less Korean than she does English, I had no idea and we had to ask Kathy teacher. Well, Kathy teacher was soooo impressed with what she had done. She kept asking me if Jasmine had copied it out of a book. I found that question so odd. And then it hit me that this is not at all a common thing for these kids to do. They are taught to just copy, memorize, and regurgitate. I want my kids to surpass that, and I am confident that (at least in some small way) some of my students will.