Dead Drops

In one of my classrooms I have a dead letter box (inside the board eraser) for passing fun "secret" messages between classes. Today I found two unsigned notes inside:

At least my board game is fun for someone, although apparently not for the game.

Board Games and Poop Mountain

This year I hit gold with a great new way to play games with my students. I call it the Board Game...because, you know, it's on the board.



If you get the hamster you can ride it to my house (complete with William Tell Overture sound effects). The spiders go to the spider web. If you get the angry teacher at the end, you have to sit in the baby chair at the beginning. If you land on the toilet you get flushed out to the sea, where a hungry shark is waiting (accompanied by the Jaws theme). Butterflies go to the flower. The egg goes to the chicken and the fried chicken goes there, too. The ghost goes to the graveyard. I forget now what the candy does. Every time we play it's different!

All the crazy drawings below it are from when I taught my kindergarten class basic prepositions. It's way more fun to talk about dinosaurs and pigs wearing butterfly necklaces than to make boring sentences like "I sit next to so-and-so," right? Yeah, I thought so, too.

My 6-year-old class really enjoys calling everything they see a poop-something (poop-fish, poop-pizza, poop-zombie (either poop-monster or poop-zombie is visible in this picture), poop-mountain, etc.). So that's Poop Mountain at the bottom there, and I drew on a trail so we can practice spelling our phonics word "hike."

Sometimes teaching can be so much fun!

Merry Christmas!

My Other Job

You may have noticed that I haven't posted very often for a long, long time.  That's because I've been spending all of my free time on my second job: I'm now a published author!

My first book: The Inventor's Slave

 My first book was released in May, but it has a lot of violence, which might not be appealing to a lot of readers of this blog, so I didn't post about it here.

My second book: Hunger Is the Best Sauce

 
My second book, however, just came out today, and you can get the e-book for free here on Black Friday, November 25th, 2016, if you're interested.

If you read either book, I would love it if you'd take a moment to leave an honest review.

In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving!

And the Winner of This Month's Funniest Test Answer Awards Is...

"I want it looking its best on show day!"

When Normal Knives Just Don't Cut It

"I swear it's not a weapon, officer - I just use it to cut watermelon!"

Rooftop

Today during my break I went up to the roof of a new building in the city. The peace and quiet was amazing, and the heat and sun were great. Here's a glimpse of the great view:



I think I'll go up there again sometime.

I Rode to Iksan!

(That isn't me in the picture, by the way. But I was snapping a shot of the view from the station and this was too fitting to pass up!)

Excitement on the Edge of Daeya

Today the weather was great, so I rode my bike to Daeya. I came in the back way, through the rice paddies, and came to my favorite intersection of the trip (it's the most interesting because it has an old-fashioned train crossing). And look what I saw!

A Studious Birth

Bored vs. Born
minus knowledge of past tense
plus bizarre use of present tense
equals...

Reincarnation adapted to the Korean worldview that to reach nirvana one must successively score higher and higher on exams.

Let's Be Clear On This

Yesterday the Barbarian's older sister gave my co-worker a different chocolate bar. It reads:

Don't misunderstand. I give in order to get.

The Barbarian Gives Me a Valentine

For reasons unknown, the Barbarian gave me a valentine today:



It reads: "Give & Take. (I will expect.)"

The verb ending implies that she is doing me a favor by expecting.

The text at the bottom, if I figured it out right, says she's just explaining the etiquette of giving and receiving to the other party (me).

This has got to be the funniest valentine I have ever gotten.

Moving in Korea

Ever wondered how people get all their big stuff into and out of their apartments when they move?

Just hire a moving company to fix one of these fancy contraptions up to your window or your balcony.

(In)Convenient Things

Here are two things that happened to me today that might give you an idea of the degree of flexibility required for a job like mine:

1. Less than a minute before the bell rang for the 3:30 class I was about to teach, one of the desk teachers (staff) came and told me that our boss had called and told her to tell me to make a test for our class (my boss is my Korean co-teacher for this class) to take at 4:30. (This class always takes a test at 4:30 on Fridays, but usually my boss makes it. It's Lunar New Year's and she's out of town so I think maybe it slipped her mind until 3:30.) Obviously I was busy from 3:30 until 4:20 teaching, so that left me 10 minutes to prepare a test. Needless to say, I was a little late for my 4:30 class.

2. Because of Lunar New Year's, one of the major Korean holidays where everybody travels to go be with family, we have a four-day weekend. (Lunar New Year's Day itself is Monday, so Tuesday is a travel day.) On my way out today I happened to glance at the whiteboard calendar in the main teachers' room and noticed that Wednesday had been marked in red, a color usually reserved for holidays. I wondered if this was a mistake because the calendar in my room showed only a four-day weekend, not a five-day weekend. So I went upstairs and asked the desk teachers if we had Wednesday off. Apparently we do, and apparently somebody announced this somewhere at some point today (maybe this afternoon?), but there was no way I ever would have known if I hadn't happened to glance at the calendar on my way out. I'm not complaining about having an extra holiday, but it is a little frustrating to know I barely missed finding out about the holiday by being the only person to come in.

These kinds of situations are not that rare here. There often seems to be an underlying assumption that communication is superfluous because people will just magically come to know important things without any opportunity to be informed, or that preparation is unnecessary because things just magically get done in negative amounts of time rather than requiring someone to think about, plan for, and then do them.

This is Korea, and this is SLP.

But -

This is also Korea, and this is also SLP:

1. The staff at an Italian restaurant I frequent regularly giving me free drinks:





2. The owner at a place I frequently get takeout from giving me hot Korean street food on snowy days or giving me soup and vegetable drinks as a free bonus.

3. My students showering me with snacks, chocolate, cards, and pictures because it is Lunar New Year's Day - or because it is any day.

Sometimes life can get a little crazy here, but I'm so happy this is home.

It's a Slippery Slope, Korea

First all your kids are running around with toy guns, and now they're foisting mango-flavored beer on me...

Misdelivery

Hey East Coast America,

I think they sent us your stuff again.

Thanksgiving Football

I didn't know this before leaving home this morning, but today is Korean Thanksgiving. Not Chuseok, which is a traditional Korean holiday, but the day in which churches across Korea give thanks to God for the harvest.

At my church we ate lots and lots of fruit, and then afterwards, my pastor asked me if I liked football, by which he meant soccer, and a bunch of us went to the Geum Gang and faced off against another church's soccer team. I didn't play but cheered heartily when we won at 4-0. (A fifth goal was scored but it was after the game ended.) It was a lot of fun.

Afterwards we all went back to church again, and ate yet more fruit - apples, pears, persimmons, pineapples, melons, bananas, and pomegranates were all included. Then we ate spicy ramen together and talked.

I asked if Koreans always play "football" on Thanksgiving, since Americans often do (play football football, I mean, not soccer). This was, apparently, a one-time event requested by the music teacher who comes to our church. (He goes to the other church but visits ours on Sunday afternoons to give lessons to our kids so they can play on the worship team.) We agreed that it would be fun to do this regularly, but after today's game we aren't sure how the other team would feel about it...

Beautiful Korea

Lake Eunpa in early October.

Even the Military is Cute Here

You may have heard that absolutely everything in Korea is cute. That would be accurate.

Behold, the super cute tiger logo used in the Korean military:



The Korean below him says:

Strong Friend
Republic of Korea Army

Cats and Robbers

Not being satisfied just telling you about my little friends, I was telling a Korean friend of mine today about the cute cat I encountered recently.  He told me that in Korean a homeless cat is called a 도둑 고양이 (doduk goyangi).  I really liked this term because the literal translation is so cute - in English it means "thief cat."