August

 The cafeteria ladies that fed us all month

So far August has been a complete vortex or whirlwind that I got sucked into. I ended up taking a month of work at an English camp for kids, so I taught 4 weeks non-stop (and I mean non-stop .. i had two Saturdays off in the whole month and that was IT.) We lived in the same building as the kids, and were locked in at 11.30pm on the dot every night, so we ended up spending a lot of our time together in the corner lounge hanging out. The crazy thing was, our Korean counterparts were told strictly no hanging out with the foreginers, and since they attend the school where the camp was held, there really could be serious ramifications for them down the line, so they kept their distance outside of work hours. Two of them would sometimes brave hanging out in the lounge with that, and for that they became most of our favourites; we got a chance to know them without feeling like we had some kind of rampantly infectious disease after hours.

 Louie - My assistant for the month and the raddest dude there. He was the only Korean guy to brave
hanging with us after hours, and even then, it was only on school grounds.

We all had our own T.A's - teachers assistants - but the degree to which they helped varied greatly between teachers. I lucked out getting this guy - I totally made a friend, but also had someone who didn't care if i taught barefoot, goofed around with the kids more than taught some classes, or helped them out with their homework a little too much. These kids were up at 7.30am doing exercises, meaning they had sometimes even worken up before 6am (they all had English camp diaries that I would read and grammatically correct, so I knew a lot about what they liked and didn't like!). They also kept going after we foreign teacher would knock off after dinner at 6.30pm - the TA's would walk the kinds back to the classrooms, and they had a full schedule of more study, homework time, and a little bit of indoor play time before their bed time of 10pm. A lot of them would stay up later anyways, just to have some play time with their friends. It was so insane. I cannot imagine being a kid in Korea.

One time in class when we had some free time, I decided a good use of the time would be to watch the Simpsons - in English with Korean subtitles. So I'm up the back of the class working or drawing or something; kinda of just half-listening to what was going on. It turns out it's an episode where Bart hasn't done his homework in a month, so Marge and Homer are sent a letter and called into Principle Skinners office, where he makes a huge pile of all the homework Bart hasn't done. Then Homer gets all on a kick and tells him to give him MORE homework, that he wants Bart to have so much homework that he turns into a Korean. 

I completely lost it.

I laughed so much up the back at the complete irony of this, and the kids were just like, "what teacher, what?!". So I went up and rewound it a little so they could see again, but their reaction was completely deadpan, and one kid pipes up, "Not funny, teacher.".

Ha. whoops. My bad.