::A Geek in Korea::

Today I had prepared a "Halloween test" as I had called it to get my students interested in studying for it. The truth was that some of the students were in need of practicing prepositions. Drawing the different monsters, items, and animals associated with Halloween around a haunted house is just fun enough for them not to think of it as studying.

I printed out the directions that listed where they had to draw specific things, then gave them the haunted house sheet that they would fill in. I hadn’t gone through Halloween vocabulary in this class, and that wasn’t the point of the lesson, so if they needed to know one of the words, I was happy to explain it to them in English. Failing that, I would translate it with my Halloween vocabulary skills the best I could.

One of my students loves to speed through her work, so once she got a few of the questions finished, I went over to check her work. She had placed the werewolf, vampire, and witch in the correct place, but was having problems with the sentence, "There is a bat flying in the sky."

I made my way around the class answering the same few questions, then worked my way back to the first student I had checked. Flying high in the sky was a picture of a baseball bat.

"What’s this?" I asked.

"A bat," she said.

"Yeah, but not the kind that usually flies. I think the word you are looking for in Korean is bak-chi." As if this wasn’t enough, I fluttered my "wings" and pointed to the rather large picture of winged bat that I had drawn on the board.

"Ahhhhh!" She exclaimed, and went to work fixing her picture.