Do I know her? Like a pastor knows his word...

It's been a pretty good week so far, surprisingly. I was pretty stressed out at first, because I didn't have either of my lessons for Monday planned ahead of time (whoops!), so Monday was a busy morning. Then Tuesday I'd been warned that a supervisor would come observe my class (and we all know how well that worked out LAST time.)

But it actually turned out perfectly fine, unexpectedly. In fairness, last time when I had to do the demonstration class, it was for a special "Teaching English in English" event... so that's why the twenty other English teachers came to observe. And apparently the official Naju Educational Board supervisor had lots of positive comments for me then... it was only Mr. Jerk (I mean, Mr. Hong) from Science High School that was determined to make me feel bad. On Tuesday, it was much less intense. For one, my entire class wasn't being videotaped. For two, there were only two people there--the supervisors. Although one of them, the man, made me (and the students, probably) nervous by standing next to one of their tables the entire time holding a Korean-English dictionary. I'm not sure what he was looking up, but I just tried to ignore him. Plus, they only stayed for about twenty minutes, which was sort of good, because then I went back to normal and didn't have to feel nervous. It was sort of unfortunate, however, because they watched the entire teacher-led "reading and repeating" portion and then left right before the student-centered SPEAKING activity, during which each student generated at least three English sentences OUT LOUD. It was a high point of my teacher life.

I HAVE taken Mr. Hong's advice to heart and attempted to incorporate it as much as possible. I mean, I already knew that ideally, during conversation class, students should talk as much as possible. But, my students equate speaking a foreign language in front of other people with, I would say, waterboarding, which as you know, is questionably torture. So although I'd much prefer to call on students one-by-one, even during the first "teaching" part, I usually just don't have the heart. But I've changed my mind. I'm going to do it with third grade. Every day. It helps that I know all of their names without thinking, and I know that they can all read (but which ones can't do it well), so I can go out of my way to avoid embarrassing anyone too terribly. I think, after a semester, we're all a little more comfortable with each other, so I'm going to have my goal be that each student says at least two English sentences, by themselves, EVERY SINGLE CLASS. They may not like it, but they'll be better speakers for it, and that's what's most important to me. Hopefully no one cries today.

I accomplished this feat with third grade on Monday, and first grade on Tuesday, in such a sneaky way that they, in fact, might have forgotten they were speaking English. Meghan introduced a new game to me a couple weeks ago that's so devastatingly simple and devious that I can't believe I didn't think of it before. What's wrong with me? I really like the new crop of first graders at not-as-good school... they're obnoxious and talkative at times, but they've got spunk and personality, especially the girls, and a lot of them seem to really like English (because I haven't ruined it for them yet, presumably). So while I find teaching them really draining and often infuriating, they're really cute sometimes, and they're easier to trick into speaking English.

So anyway... back to supervised class. It was sad that they left before the "speaking" portion of class, but whatever. My kids knew I was nervous, again, and they were really adorable, as per usual. They all asked the question "What are you afraid of?" and answered "I am afraid of...", which was all I really wanted. Then, after class, me and co-teach had a meeting with the supervisors. I was really nervous, especially when I determined that they were just going to speak in Korean the whole time, but I'm pretty sure they just gushed about how great I was for the whole 15 minutes. I based this on 1. my amazing interpretation of tone of voice and facial expression and 2. my limited ability to understand the Korean words "great" "well done" and "active." ("Active" is Konglish, so it sounds like this "ak-ti-buh.") We spent a large part of the meeting discussing how my "suh-ta-eel" (style) is different from Korean teachers, but this is a good thing. My co-teacher was really nice too, and at one point I was able to understand the Korean sentence "During Camp's class, I learn too." This would be really heart-warming... except she seldom comes to my classes. lol. But she does love me, because in effect, I remove roughly 45% of her teaching class-load. So yeah, the meeting was good, so far as I could tell.

Later, as we were driving home, my co-teacher said: "Thank you. Because of you, I am praised very highly." Well... good. :)

I lesson planned my ass off at school this week. Since I now teach 5 more classes than I was teaching at the beginning of the semester, thanks to after-school "advanced" classes, I now have to create about 3 extra lesson plans each week. This threw off the planning schedule that had been working so well previously, and I got behind last week and had to plan at home at night and early in the morning, so I was determined not to let that happen this week. I turned on Yahoo!Radio, put on my headphones, and buckled down and got it done, and I even had extra time yesterday to hang out and socialize with some third graders for awhile. It was, overall, a pretty good day.

My back is... a lot better. It's still tight and a little twingy every morning when I wake up, but the past few days it's loosened up fairly early in the day and not bothered me too much. I tried lifting weights yesterday morning, and that didn't feel good at all, so I stopped and just walked on the treadmill. It might have been because I did it first thing in the morning, when my back was tightest... I'll try again on Friday afternoon, I think. But I was able to do my whole 30 (and 32) minute runs on Tuesday and this morning, without much pain, so I'm back on track with 5k training. Good thing too, since there's only 17 days until the BIG RACE! I'm planning on running every other day, with a two day buffer right before the race, so today was the first of my last 8 runs. Saturday I'll do number 2/8, and I'm planning on doing it on the actual race route to see how much of the 5k I'm actually completing in 30 minutes at my unbelievably slow pace. It'll take me at least 25 minutes to walk to the start, which isn't ideal, but I'll be doing that on race day too, and I should have plenty of free time on Saturday.

I'm actually composing this entry in the car on my way to good school (yay!), where today we have (what I think are) fun lessons planned, so hopefully it'll be a good day. I have a date with one of my students during lunch to teach him how to play checkers, so we'll see how THAT goes. I'm refreshing my own memory of the rules with Wikipedia, and contemplating how I'm going to explain them in broken English. I'm thinking things will get confusing with "kinging," but whatever. It seems much simpler than the Korean board games they play, so I'll just do my best.

Oh yeah... one other thing, which could be construed as most important, but which I'm hedging about mentioning. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but last Thursday during super-painful teacher "picnic," good school principal expressed lots of enthusiasm about me staying until December, leaving the ball in the court of not-so-good school principal and the Naju School Board. Yesterday good school co-teacher called not-so-good school co-teacher to broach the topic, and things moved quickly. Not-so-good school co-teacher (the same one from this week's supervisor class) was thrilled at the prospect of having someone else teach half her classes for six more months, so she leaned on not-so-good principal (the man who doesn't really know (or care) much about my existence), who also agreed eventually. Then, not wasting any time, she called the Naju School Board the same day. They also agreed that it would be possible, but they countered with "it would have to be okayed by Fulbright." Not-so-good school co-teacher (who is less good at English) told me it was almost 100% sure that I could stay. I talked to good school co-teacher later, and she told me that in fact they'd said they couldn't fully approve it yet, for whatever reason, but that they were talking "in a positive way." (That was how she put it.) I'm still worried that things will break down, as lately the Fulbright Director has apparently been telling people that extending for 6 months is not really an option, but I'm going to remind her that she told me, at the conference, that it was okay. Not sure when we'll know for sure, although I just found out that the deadline for informing Fulbright that you want to stay is May 13. I'll go ahead and do the application, and just see how it goes.

Oh... I finished another book: 17. Bob Harris's Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up (A Woefully Inadequate Guide). That's quite a mouthful, huh? The premise is interesting, and it's written by a humorist, but it definitely lives up to the last part of its title ("a woefully inadequate guide"). It purports to be a handy (only about 200 pages) guide to nearly all the world's ongoing conflicts, divided by geographical region. No country gets more than 10 pages, and it definitely offers a glance at a lot of things. It was a little frustrating that everything was covered in such a cursory way, and although he tries hard to give the background and some context, I often found myself confused, because 250 words is just simply not enough to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (That's a bad example... I'm actually fairly informed about the I-P conflict, thanks to my "Modern Middle East" class, so the 250 words was enough. Africa and Asia were more problematic, and I often found myself still confused.) I guess I do, however, have a better idea about some things that I did before I read the book, and I have at least a vague awareness of the major players, which is a step up. I know it was just intended to be a basic index, and I could Wikipedia any of it if I REALLY wanted to know more, I suppose. It's an interesting paradox though, I think. If I were the type of person who really wanted to be informed on current events, I would already know this cursory background, and I would actively seek out other sources to supplement it. If I don't care about current events, then I probably wouldn't pick up the book. I wonder what exactly the intended audience is... It's not nearly comprehensive enough for a college course. It grossly oversimplifies in a lot of cases, as the author acknowledges. And I don't think it's probably funny enough to suck in anyone who doesn't otherwise care about history and conflict. But I'm glad I read it, and I'll try to use it as a jumping-off point for other topics I might want to read about in non-fiction.

Unfortunately, I'm now almost completely out of English books. Blowing through the big stack in April was gratifying, and got me caught up for my new year's resolution, but I haven't actually purchased any new ones yet, so this week I'm reading... wait for it... Moby Dick. Gross, I know. It's 650 pages long, and boring as Hell, but I'm forcing myself to stick to my reading every day habit, and currently, it's my only choice. Not true--I borrowed Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from Tim last night, but I've already started MD, so I'm going to try to finish it. Woolf's book might be just as boring, you never know. I'm going to try to borrow and beg until I get paid on the 17th and can pick up some stuff I really WANT to read at the bookstore in Gwangju.