Just another week in Korea

So this week was full of interesting experiences...

On Tuesday before my kindergarten class started, I got hit with a bathroom emergency. This happens to me from time to time but I will spare you the details. Here is the problem though, the school I teach at has only one adult size toilet and it was occupied. I waited for a good ten-ish minutes but it didn't look as though it would be vacant in the near future. So I weighed my options and decided that I would use the kids toilet. However, the doors for these stalls only come up to my shoulder and they don't lock and there is the ever-present potential that one of 120+ little boys or girls could walk right in on me or worse a female Korean teacher could come in checking on the status of a lost child. But I did what I had to do and a little boy walked in only as I was washing my hands. Disaster averted...on many levels.

On Wednesday, a co-teacher and I were given the task of cleaning up the basement, which is mostly used for English class and storage. We dusted, vacuumed and mopped and the place looked pretty clean. However, when I got to school the following morning I was greeted by several apologies. I soon found out that two of the five year-old boys had escaped sometime between the end of kindergarten and the start of day care (provided for families where both parents work) and had made their way to the basement. In a matter of minutes, they had managed to turn on a tap and cover the floor in water, get a hold of markers and decorate the walls, chairs and English material and rip to shreds vocabulary word cards and other materials. It was an impressive destruction of the English classroom. Oh, and I forgot to mention how this had happened three days before the school's open house, where the parents come and observe.

Also this week, a bilingual co-teacher translated one of the conversations that two of the girls were having while they entered the school that morning. It went something like this: Girl 1: We live in the same building (apartment) and go to the same school, but why are you in the six-year old class and I in the five-year old class?  Girl 2: Because I was born in January or February and you weren't (based on the Lunar New Year). Girl 1: Oh, ok.

Finally, here is a sentence written by one of my second grade students that made me smile: My birstday is autumn.