Yoho Yoho ...

... a blogger's life for me. At some point in every blogger's existence in cyberspace, you find yourself writing a blog about why you blog. We all do it. We all question why we spend hours every week, or even every day, writing blog entries. We all ask ourselves, do we really love it or are we just addicted? We all come up with our own personal reasons, but what it comes down to is that we are all storytellers of one sort or another and we all have stories to tell. One aspect of this trip that has given us ample supply of stories to draw from is the kids we teach. Here is something about this blog that would be really magical: We are in Korea teaching kids how to write, speak, listen to, and read English. What if some of these Korean children grow up to become fluent in the language they are studying and one day, while trolling cyberspace, come across this blog; a blog that talks about them and shows pictures of them as they were going through the process of learning English. Not all of it is good stuff, mind you, but it's all truthful and they could see what they were like in school from the teachers' perspectives. Some of these students are really a joy to teach and we will miss some of them. Some not so much. This class, in particular, was Jenn's worst and she often needed consolation from me everytime it rolled around. The classroom can seat eight comfortably, so it wasn't easy walking in when it was crammed with thirteen rugrats who rarely sat still for two minutes and usually all talked at the same time. These are two brothers at our school. The older one is Denny, who I taught, and he was very respectful and studious, although one day he came to school with spots all over his face and we were horrified that a mother sent her child to school with chicken pox. There was no outbreak at the school so it must have been some other skin condition that wasn't contagious. The younger one is Frankie, who was the bane of Jenn's existence for a few months. But he got this contraption on his face about a month ago and he's not quite so bad anymore. We aren't sure what the contraption is for yet; if it's braces, we can't figure out why it goes from his chin to his forehead. This is also the same little guy that was brave enough to wear a ponytail to emulate his favourite Canadian teacher. These are two of my hyper students. Every single day, Shelley (with the glasses) runs up to Jenn and spastically screams at her, "Hello cute girl!!!!" while frantically waving both hands. When we leave here, Jenn's days will feel incomplete without this daily greeting. She has warned me that I will have to do it every so often to ween her off it. We are going to have to get used to not being the centre of attention. But that's more of a relief really.