Students

Hello! I'm back with another blog entry after quite a long delay. It's hard to know what to write about all the time since I've started settling into my daily routine, so please leave a comment if there's anything you'd like to know more about. Thanks as always for your support.

Today I wanted to talk about some fun interactions that I've had with my students.

Thumb Wars

Occasionally after class I go to the kindergarten to read books to the students. I don't get paid extra to do it, but I like to visit them, and the teachers are very welcoming of me. Although they're still young, they do a good job repeating after me when I read. Because they all know me know, every time I see them at lunch they all say hi to me. One of the students in particular seems to really like me and always makes me play thumb wars with her when she sees me.

Games

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, some of my students were really impressed that I played Overwatch and used to work at Blizzard. Because the class is so small (only 4 students!) it makes it easy to theme the lessons for their interests, so we usually end up talking about different video games or Marvel characters. It's fun to connect with the students over our shared interests.

Baldness

I like to think that my Korean has improved a lot since I got here, but sometimes I still make some silly mistakes. There was one time that I was trying to explain to a student what the word "bald" meant. In Korean, the word for "hair" is "머리카락" (literally, "head appendage"), but it's usually shortened to "머리". When I told her that "bald" meant "no 머리" she kind of giggled, and I didn't realize why until later. "머리" means "hair", but it also just means "head", so at that time it sounded like I was saying "no head".

Pokemon

I've started collecting little gifts from my students. So far, I've received a plastic heart, a green tea latte, several fudge cookies, a hand-made propeller toy, and a tiny bow that I took the liberty of sewing to my Gengar-Ditto plushy. Speaking of Pokemon, Gengar-Ditto is a huge celebrity in the classroom, even getting a few portraits made of it by the students. Everyone calls it by its Korean name, Phantom. They were also excited when I added some new Pokemon to my collection, so it's clear that Pokemon is still just as popular as when I was their age. I am required to teach a summer camp in a few weeks, so I thought it would be fun to do a Pokemon-themed camp where the students have to collect gym badges (if you know me from UCI, you're probably familiar with a similar activity that I organized back then).

Stay tune for updates on how it goes!