::A Geek in Korea::

When I arrived at school today, I saw my director cleaning and preparing one of the storage rooms. The room had been covered in junk from around the school since the remodeling a few weeks ago. They were picking things up and organizing them for the first time. Over time, all the extra crap started getting handed out to students.

In my first class, my students all had balloons. Someone had put the balloon hand pump and balloon ties and sticks in one of the classrooms. The students had formed a line and were filling up balloons for each other. The earliest classes are the youngest students, so the children were overjoyed at getting balloons. They ran around the school hitting each other with balloons.

I have a hard enough time trying to control some of the students. Adding in balloons they can hit people with, or balloons to chew on means I’ve got more problems. Some students simply can’t handle anything more than sitting in a chair. Any stimulations beyond this sends them whirling out of control. Colorful balloons didn’t help me one bit.

The next hour of classes, I started teaching before I realized every student had oversize adjustable visors. All of the students were fiddling with the different Velcro settings and setting the visors on their head in different configurations. Oh boy, Velcro! That’s one of those pleasant sounds I never get tired of hearing all class! I told students to keep their focus on the books, not their headgear.

Since there was some value in snagging a visor, some of the girls in a class I used to teach took far more than their share. Other students complained, and soon there was a collection of extra visors. We were only to hand out the visors from the teacher’s room, and only one per student. As if I have time for worrying about who had a visor between classes.

The last new innovation for today was the installation of a cocoa and hot drinks machine in the school. What’s the best way to keep students studying? Pump them with super hot chocolate and sugar! Hot drinks in a classroom? Oh, scalding temperatures will just keep students on their feet as they run around the school. They’ll only bump into someone with a hot drink a few times before they learn. Mind the mess and try not to slip!

The machine is only 100 won, so children can afford several drinks between classes. Their pea sized bladders won’t hold such drinks for long! It’s best to let them out of class so they can run to the bathroom, careful to avoid the spills on the floor, and grab some more hot vending machine smack.

The more organized this school gets, the worse off I seem to be.