::A Geek in Korea::

Every student I taught knew that today was the last day of intensive classes with me. My first class staged a mini-revolt during their five minute vocabulary regurgitation vocabulary test. Since half the class didn’t attend on the Saturday "make up day" for our holiday this week, they didn’t know which words to study for the test. As such, the highest level students in the school were failing their first vocabulary test of the summer intensive period. Panic attacks ensued.

Then, one student said, "Hey, if we all erase our names from the test, they won’t know who to fail!" Except this plan didn’t exactly work, since they all have distinct handwriting and half of them erased their names poorly. Also, one of the students had actually studied and wouldn’t remove her name from her paper. Sorting our who was who was relatively simple. The secretary and I figured out who they were, made them resign the tests. They all failed and needed to be retested. It’s never ending.

The lowest level class I taught was in a screaming, shouting mood. We finished our book relatively quickly, but I was well prepared. I played a game of "write down vocabulary" Bingo. The only word bank I could use in the book we had was of Disney Characters. We had more Disney characters to learn than phonics words in the back of the book. Pathetic. Anyway, they created their bingo sheets, but none of them could read the names without the pictures identifying who they were. I spend the first half of class reading Disney words and trying to keep their shrieks down to a low blood curdle.The drama was so intense that another teacher came in to tell me that one of my students had pounded the wall, probably in agony, as her team lost the lead.

I had just such the tool for preventing the class from getting too out of control. During the break between the two hours of class, I had grabbed the schools "Pointer" which is really a huge stick we carry to scare the shit out of students. I have my own pointer which I don’t use which is around the size of a ruler somewhere in my house, but this thing was three times as long, almost a miniature sword made out of wood. I carried into class and one of my slower students saw me, stopped, and just started "twitching" as if the thing brought back memories.

I also returned with a board game from Boggle’s World. The "Say Four Things" board game always saves me when I’m backed into a teaching "corner" so to speak. This class was extra large, with 11 low level students, so I printed off two copies of the board for each team of five or six students. Then I gave each team two different colored Post-It-notes. That way, they could keep track of the other team’s progress without all crowding around the same board and getting in each other’s way. Also, I used Post-It-notes because they could customize their little team name marker as they moved it around the board, but wouldn’t be tempted to take it or be able to lose it easily. They are also cheap and replaceable.

These students started getting wild as the game took its back and forth pace. Several times each team would pull ahead, then miss a question and be forced back.  Eventually one team won as the clock ran out. We had a good time, even if it was too loud and my throat was too rough.