The weather is here, wish you were beautiful

The weather here is AMAZING! Everyone kept telling me how hot the summer is, and I kept laughing in their face. Well, it's June and I still haven't turned on the a/c (unless you count my 5-day roommate insisting upon it being turned on...women). I've also had the windows open for almost a week now. It does get warm and sticky in the day, but I work until 10pm so by the time I get home the weather is beautiful. I sleep with a thick sheet on me, and I actually woke up around 10am this morning, a little chilly. It was wonderful. Eat your heart out you sweating Charlestonians. (side note, the weather thing on my blog is wrong. It's reporting from Argentina, even though I have it pointed at Seoul. I'm going to continue to try to fix it, or just take it off. I'm sure none of you look at it anyway, since you can't read celcius ;)

Saturday is Korean Memorial Day, and Topia is going to a baseball game on Sunday. From what I can tell, the baseball teams here don't have city names and mascots. Instead, the company that sponsors them gives them their name. For instance, there's a Samsung team, an LG team, etc. I don't know how the mascots work, but they probably have them. I have to imagine that in Asia, where everything that can be drawn as a cartoon is drawn as a cartoon, they'd have silly mascots.

My new classes are great. The two mastery classes that I teach are full of brilliant students. They're all fluent in English, and if they were in America they'd be in a gifted and talented class, or whatever you call it. As such, we're already getting into literary analysis with 4th and 5th graders. It's a joy to teach them, but it's also a lot of work. I have to do some serious prep work, and I can't always figure out the answers to their homework while in the class. So, I basically do the same homework they do, except the writing. My other classes are all new to me, with a handful of exceptions. I'm glad they're new, though, because I made a lot of mistakes last semester with discipline, and I can begin to fix that this semester. It sounds kinda weird and mean, but you really do have to train your kids like they're your pet or something. If you train them well, they'll act better and learn better, but if you don't train them then class is a pain and less learning gets done. I nearly threw a student out of class on the first day. That's the class I know I'm going to have problems with; they're in 6th grade and their English isn't very good. They've also been together for a few semesters so they're very familiar and comfortable with each other, and it's almost as if I'm walking in on a conversation, and have to awkwardly stand there until it's finished. I have to train them to look to me and not to each other.

Oh well, challenges ahead, lessons behind, weather all around.