Manic Monday

Boy, Monday sure was a Monday.  First off, I realized that I forgot to grade some papers over the weekend, so I hurried to get them graded before classes began, but I failed.  I still had a few to grade while I had to teach class, but fortunately two classes had Unit tests so I finished them then.  However, I missed two and had to grade them during the class I was supposed to give them back in, oops.  As usual, I ran out of time in one class and had far too much time in another.  I'm really working on time management in class, but it alludes me often.  I caught two children cheating on a Unit test, which is kinda weird because all the students cover their papers, even during a simple word test.  I was very disappointed, called them out in class, gave them extra homework, and marked the question wrong they were cheating on.  I told them that if I ever caught anyone cheating they would get a zero on the whole test.  Anyway, I graded all the tests and in one class everyone did very well, but in my other class everyone did very bad.  

I'm getting much better at reading, though not as fast as a native speaker yet.  I've started learning a few phrases, such as "hello" (an young ha say yo) and "goodbye" (an young hee ga say yo, only said when you're leaving and the other person is staying).  I don't think I mentioned this before, but Grace's dad wrote a book called How to be a Better Speaker than Obama, which I think is a hilarious title for a book.  It's in Korean, and I've started reading it, though of course I don't know what I'm reading, yet.  I'll probably make it through the first third of the book before I can even recognize most words, then I'll get to the last third of the book and finally be able to understand most of what I read, but I won't know what I'm reading b/c I missed the first 2/3 of the book.  At least I've got a lot of reading material to practice with.  Before I was grabbing the free newspapers and saving my receipts to read later, haha.

I had a meeting with Paul today who said that everyone's really happy with my work and what I'm doing, and their only critique after observing me (via CCTV, so I didn't know) was time management, and I'd agree.  I think I'm doing a good job because the students are learning, and I'm glad to know that my bosses agree.