i found a place that sells "barrilitos de cerveza" y "chasquitos".. both lollies from mexico? I was amazed.

The guy at the shop was asking me something, the only thing that i could understand was if children ate these things in mexico.. but he kept asking me the same question as if the correct answer wasn't yes. =) People often talk to me even though i say in my broken korean that i do not speak korean. I've picked up the frase "I don't know" from my kids, who end up saying 'bolayo' quite often during my classes.. 'bola' for short. Poor kids.

I've also have been forced to take a new class, which pushes my week's number to 21 80-minute classes. I'm not happy. I never really liked being the art teacher for all the little preschoolers and now I am incharge of yet another preeschool class. I am not only thier art teacher but I also have to feed them. Believe me when I tell you, feeding is not fun. I find Korean food not the most tasty food in the world, but bad Korean food is simply disgusting. =) The other thing is that it cuts into my morning planning.. now, i am definitely going to have to be at the school by 11 am each day and work five classes in a row on tu and thu.. Not only do i not get lunch, I also don't have a break at all until the last class...The only good thing of the arrangement is that because all the teachers got really upset about having to take this class, they are paying me overtime for this class .

The preschoolers are cute but they are insane. Our school didn't invest in a playroom so they have nothing to play with and go insane throwing things at each other and pretending to fight. Someone always cries. Today one of the girls that suffers from Princess Syndrome (this is a seriously defined syndrome in Korea) asked me if she could look down my shirt...'teachaaa.. only me'.. hehehe. I'll never know their names either.. I resolved this in my other classes by giving everybody english names.. this will come and bite me in the ass, i know it, but right now it is quite happy.

How did I ever end up as a teacher? I forget easily, I barely know things that are relevant to MY own life, am lazy, and i am very informal. I don't like to be defined by my classes.. I have several siblings in different classes and i wonder what they say to their parents: in once class i am brilliant, in the other I am absolutely terrible. The same activites will fail in some classes and in other classes they are true gems!

On a whole different topic, I have become quite curious in the linguistics of my life right now.. I am reading a fascinating book that builds upon the chomsky idea that if a martian where to come to the earth it would find that we speak one language.. (there's a very extensive explanation for that) but a lot of the book compares the difference between an SVO (subject, verb, object) language like english and an SOV language like Japanese and Korean...I am fascinated by how hard it is for the kids in a program like slp, which insists in oonversation-only and no grammar, to extract knowledge from what we are doing; or extrapelate ideas from their own life (in Korean) to English. After 4 years of slp they still say 'teach, you can do what?" EVEN THOUGH,in Korean, "mwo" has the same meaning AND position as what in english.