::A Geek in Korea::

My first attempt at going over my syllabus in my introductory college level course for my university did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Last year when I gave my students a syllabus for the higher level course, I was able to have conversations with a lot higher level of confidence of being understood. Now that I am teaching level one, the beginner level, I have twenty wide-eye stares of people that seem to want to bolt for the registrar and look for another teacher. It is going to be a really significant problem to get over this difference in ability.

A few weeks ago I went through all my materials and simplified everything. I don’t write in a complicated style for students to begin with, but I decided that I needed to be more concise and use simple tenses and verbs. Present tense whenever possible. Positive statements. No idioms. I eliminated any compound sentences, and I used common verbs that students that studied English from elementary school should know. I have lots of ways to organize my materials, but I went for a simple, straightforward style with bullet points and a few rules. I’d introduce a rule, then have a short three or four sentence paragraph with clear reasons behind how I would enforce this rule. I’d pause after two sentences, state the idea another way, write on the board, then continue on when I thought that I had exhausted the point.

I have a tendency to speak pretty quickly on my first day of a new class because of nerves. I hate that awkward silence where no one is comfortable speaking. I am aware of this, so I intentionally tried to slow down. I took long pauses after I introduced a topic, drinking water and asking for any follow up questions. Last semester, I went through the entire syllabus and the explanation of what we were going to do class by class, and it took around forty minutes. I spent the rest of the time going over any personal questions the students have about me, had a few little conversations with higher level students who were showing off by asking questions, and let them go after an hour.

Today, I went over only my syllabus and it took an hour. I slowed my speaking down and covered the materials as clearly as I could, yet I still got no responses from the students. I don’t know if any student in the class could understand anything I was saying.

I took attendance, then opened up the class to asking me a few questions about myself. The first question was, of course, “How old are you?”

I used to shrug off this question from children. They don’t know any better than to ask it to everyone. Their lives are spent hashing out who is older and younger. They want to know who will spent time making them feel like shit, and who they can talk down to in a condescending way without getting in trouble. It’s not that I am sensitive about my age in Korea. I’m older than all of my university students, so I don’t need to worry about some ageist patronizing bullshit, but if students in university really still don’t know it is rude to ask people about their age before any other single thing to a complete stranger, I have a long, hard road ahead of me.

At least that student asked me something. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried about this semester…I hope my classes tomorrow are a little better.

Last semester, the last four weeks of class were ridiculous because there were several holidays that landed in the middle of the busiest part of the semester. There were national holidays and university celebrations for several days. Some of my classes didn’t see me for an entire week of class. You had to plan far in advance, and usually the events that are local don’t show up on any calendar in the office. You just have to know about it from someone else. Technically there is a policy of makeup days, where you spend extra time during a week with the same students to make up for any class you miss that is canceled or rescheduled. This is never actually possible to do, because everyone’e schedule is different and no one can stay after for an hour when you have another class in a block one after another. Instead, I was told to pick days we already have class and simply count that twice in the attendance. Other than setting up a night class, there is nothing else anyone could possibly do about it.

This semester started off with a rescheduling bomb. Only a few days before we were supposed to start teaching, we found out that everyone’s assumption about when the semester actually started was wrong! We didn’t start on a Monday, but a Wednesday! The materials I was struggling to create for my second class this week weren’t needed, because I will only see one of my classes twice this coming week. I’ll simply pick out some “getting to know you” materials and let the class fill out their student information forms in class.

I thought if that was a simple enough change to make now, I should look at the rest of the semester to see if any holidays fall during the week. If I plan for it now, I won’t be surprised and be forced to reschedule things later on. I spent two weeks trying to figure out how to move around all my materials in the time I had left. If I do that before the semester starts, any changes I make will be much easier. I looked at the calendar…there isn’t a single holiday during the rest of the semester except a week for Korean Thanksgiving.

Other than a week off during the first month of the semester, there isn’t another weekday vacation day any time this semester! That makes it easy to find time, and to teach more materials, but it also is a major issue for burn out. I don’t get vacation immediately after the semester ends either. I have a late evening class all the way into my normal vacation time. My final class this semester ends around Christmas Eve. That is a long time off.

This summer vacation has been wonderful. I got to spend time with my family, and help around the house. I’m interested in what the next semester might hold for me, but right now I’m happy I have two more days to enjoy some time off.

After all the kid wrangling, doctors appointments, dog walking, shopping and visits by my Korean Mother-in-law were over for today, I had a window of time where I was supposed to go into my computer room office and get down to work. I had the whole house to myself, Yoshi was out on the veranda, and all I needed to do was sit down and work for a few hours to prepare something to do next semester for any lessons I could brainstorm an activity to use in class. I was working and thinking about different things, of course, because I was still at home. Dishes that needed to be washed. Toys that needed to be put away. Drinks and snacks that needed to be eaten. It was rather ridiculous that I had all this time, but it was going to waste because I had to find space on my desk to open up the materials and start planning.

Last semester I went to work and sat for a few hours cleaning out my desk. It was cathartic. A new start to a new semester. I put together a six week lesson plan in an afternoon just running through old stuff I had used and finding space for all the ideas I had collected during my previous semester. An empty office at work with time to be productive is great for me. I can take over the copy machine. I can go through my drawers and find anything I need. I can make a mess, briefly, and not apologize. I don’t need to make small talk. I don’t need to answer people’s questions, or chat. It’s all work.

I didn’t even have music on, or use the web for anything distracting. I was all work. I went through a series of books and found all the materials I could use in my lessons for the entire semester. If I weren’t so foolish ambitious I could simply hand out what I had and be covered for every lesson where I had to fill time when the book ran short. There are a few specialized lessons that everyone does that I need to prepare my own version, or find a copy of what everyone else does and see if it works for my classes. I’ve also got to get samples for the forms and elements they use for the project I inherited this semester. A lot of my material is going to be recycled and refined instead of pioneering new materials for projects.

I’m hesitant to get any more detailed work ready for the semester until I can see the relative difference between my new lower level classes and what I am used to teaching. This week I went through around twenty revisions of my syllabus, removing hard words and making it as simple as possible. It is two pages of class rules and a lot of simple words. I think I’ll spend the first class going over it, and the second reenacting the rules with puppets if it doesn’t go over well. Other than that, I got a lot of work done. I have 12 weeks of materials, and I probably only need to spend an hour or two on each of them to get them ready. Considering that I spent dozens of hours preparing lessons last semester, I’m feeling either very cocky, or a lot more relaxed.

My vacation is mostly going to consist of spending the last few days before the semester trying to figure out what I need to do in class this semester. The time for procrastination has ended! I will shake off the heat-daze that has prevented me from getting any real work done, and go to work for real this week. Really. Honestly.

I must admit, the summer vacation this year has been a lot of fun. First of all, I got through a vacation to the States with my wife and daughter and had a great time just hanging around the house sleeping and catching up on the World Cup games. Then I returned to Korean to teach a single “Survival English” class that I claimed “was death.” After that extremely underwhelming class was finished, I got to teach elementary and middle school students. It was a much needed change for me. I enjoyed it a lot more than the difficult college intensive course I taught last winter. I gave the farewell speech to the audience at the end of the elementary school camp, and I had a good time doing it. The entire camp was a blast. As long as the winter camp is run by the same people, I’ll be volunteering again without reservation.

Now it’s back to the grind of planning my syllabus, working on materials, and preparing for new classes. There has been a miscommunication with the office, and I’m scheduled to teach institute at night once again, despite it not making any bit of sense to anyone that would look at my schedule. I’ve asked for a change, but once again, being the lowest person on the rung of the security ladder will only make that harder. I’ve also been alerted to a potentially HUGE change in who I am teaching. There is a chance I might end up teaching middle school students during the semester, not just at camps. This is the first I’ve been told of this. Other than the time of the class itself, I am indifferent about the idea. From what someone let on, the class is running EXTREMELY late in the evening for me, so I’m a little annoyed that I haven’t been told about this before now. I had two goals this semester. Get out early, and spend less time at work. The office is trying to suck me right back in again, and I don’t like it now that I have a taste of freedom.

If I don’t get to change my schedule to move my classes to the morning schedule, I’ll be getting a few more hours of sleep. I’ll just be up later every evening working all the time. This extra sleep in the morning would help, but that would also require my dog and daughter to follow along with that particular script. As of right now, I wake up two or three times a night to a screaming, inconsolable daughter. If she wakes up when it is dark, I let my wife handle it. If she wakes up when the sun is up, I try to take her out of the bedroom to settle her down. If the semester starts and she is still sleepless, I’ll end up banished in the spare bedroom once again. Daddy needs his sleep. Even in a hot room without an air conditioner, Daddy needs his sleep.

Because I have a problem saying, “No time!” to people with similar interests that want to spend time with me, I’m not only planning a schedule for an entire semester, but also planning out a low level campaign for Dungeons and Dragons. This is a labor of love, not unlike writing daily for this website, but it is also a fair bit of time commitment for a week where I really should be focusing on something else. I built a map and picked out a scenario to run for Wednesday after I finished my chores today and whittled down my sleep debt to a more manageable amount with a short nap. I’m nervous about what is going to start happening when the play by post game I am involved with starts going again during the semester and I have to juggle two games potentially, one periodically offline, one daily online.

There is a lot of other stuff going on. We have to deal with any potential abandonment issues Glow might have from her short weekday trips to daycare. I have to find some time to exercise, and walk Yoshi in this unbearable humidity. I have to help with the housework and all the other responsibilities of being a parent. With no sleep…and a time deadline looming. It’s a bit worrying that I still don’t have the drive to sit down and be productive this close to the start of the new semester. Last semester I had a clue as to what I was going to be doing for the entire first half of the semester. Now I’m still trying to decide if I want to make the students buy the workbook, or have them just do copies I make available on the web. Eventually I’ll have to start deciding on those choices, because my schedule is running out of free time.

One of the challenges of a rotating class session is that for two hours of the day when I teach the “doctor” class at the end of my summer class, I have no idea what kind of students will be walking in the door. The gradient for the different levels is so ridiculous that you can’t really tell who is good or bad. Unless they are at one end of the chart or the other there is no real way to tell if the “High Intermediate” is better than the “Lower Advanced”. I do my best to place students into the proper levels, but honestly there are not that many ways you can do it.

I have no idea what level walked into my class today, but I do know that they were in either fifth or sixth grade simply because they were huge compared to my normal students. They were very hormonal and clannish. There were clearly delineated social groups that would poke and prod each other during the lesson. I have two hours to start from nothing and get them working in a positive learning environment. I don’t know who teaches them most days, and how they normally behave, but when they came into class these particular students were looking to pounce on me.

Kids about the enter, or in middle school, will often be very defensive about their English levels. This is the point where their skill and testing ability will start to have a measurably impact on their future. Getting into a better middle school than a peer can be a powerful motivator, or can wreck a lower achieving student’s self-confidence. That increases stress, and can amplify the negative behaviors of students this age. Some of the students will be more likely to answer questions, others are more likely to shut down, but all of them are going to try to embarrass a teacher whenever they have an opportunity. Especially a foreign teacher, if you let them.

The students don’t know a thing about me. It’s very likely they don’t even know my name. I this is the first and only time I see them in class. As such, when they would struggle with some of the new vocabulary, I would give them time to try to take a Korean answer they knew and turn it into an English answer. At first the students would say something like, “The answer is X”, but only in Korean. I would react by saying, “Say it in English, please,” to which they would reply, “I know the answer in Korean, not in English.” I don’t mind this, as long as they can tell me that they know what is going on, but simply lack either the grammar or the vocabulary to put it into words. That’s my job! If I can get them to this point, all I need to know is either the gist of what they are saying, or trick them into rephrasing it in a way they do know how to say it. You can’t let them get away with speaking Korean the entire time in class. If they aren’t learning new words, you aren’t doing your job.

Today the work they was throwing everyone was “ankle”. In Korean it is “Pal-mok“, and it translates, rather logically, as your “Foot Neck”. Wrist works in a similar way, being “Sohn-mok“, or “hand neck”. The students said, “Oh, it’s a PALMOK!” when I pointed to the picture of an ankle. I responded by saying, “No, it’s not a foot neck. It has a special word, which is different than the other parts of the body in English. Does anyone know it?”

These students were quick. They realized that I must know Korean if I could literally translate their answers. The second thing students of this age want to do is put down anyone that doesn’t know Korean as well as they do. Foreign teachers bare the burden of this all the time. “DO YOU SPEAK KOREAN!? SAY HELLO IN KOREAN!”

I’ve long deplored the “dancing monkey” phase of Korean classrooms, and I won’t fall for that sort of taunting. As a foreign English professor, you have no reason to get in a competition with them about speaking Korean, because that isn’t the reason you are in the classroom. If someone asks me in class if I speak Korean, especially if they ask me in Korean, I answer honestly, “No, I don’t speak Korean in class. I don’t speak Korean in English class. I speak English because I am an English teacher. You should speak English too, because you are in English class.”

I don’t mock, or taunt anyone. If this doesn’t satisfy them, they can simply be left to wonder if I know what is going on or not. The students in my class today decided that, “Oh, he understands everything we say, we might as well speak English, because we don’t get any benefit by making fun of him in Korean…”

Once we got to this point, the class took a behavioral change for the better. We had finished our main lessons, and I let the students play a few games relating to the topic. By the time the class had ended, the students actually groaned in disappointment about having to go home. They complimented me by saying my class was fun.

Woah. That almost never happens.

In fact, I went in on the defensive, to actually winning over the students and having a very good time with them. I don’t know how they behave in class with their regular teacher, but they seemed fine once they got to know you.

I’ve been teaching middle school students how to improve their public speaking abilities. A lot of the problem with a public speaking class, in my opinion, is that students feel very vulnerable in front of a class speaking by themselves for any period of time. These skills have to be taught with any language. Middle school was when I learned public speaking, and it terrified me. I remember people having full breakdowns in front of class, and all it took was one snide remark from a peer to wreck your confidence.

The students had prepared a three minute speech about a topic. They had to prepare the speech and work on making it visually well presented too. Eye contact. Smiles. No notes. Expressive voices. Natural gestures. Student after student I had to watch the same mistakes.

It can be nerve wracking to get up in front of a lot of different strangers and say some stuff that you may not remember all that well. That’s the life of an unprepared professor too. After each presentation, I broke down the points on the rubric and showed them their bad habits. The boy with braces would cover his mouth. The girl with low confidence would bury her head in her notes. One corner of the classroom must have been particularly interesting, because they stared at it every time they looked up to take a breath of air.

The students that tried to use gestures and didn’t bury their head or lock their arms were a lot better. It’s weird that the non-verbal clues about confidence are so striking when you try to introduce them and start pointing them out to everyone. The huge checklist I had in front of me got a lot of work as I watched the students struggle with their body language. If their body language was saying anything, it was, “I’m trapped in front of class and I don’t want to be here!”

To get away from the monotony of focused speaking exercises each class, I extended the speaking lesson to include a game of Charades. I warmed up the class with a handout with common speech expressions with easy non-verbal clues. For example, one sentence was, “My first point is…” and the students would have to give some sort of non-verbal clue as to how they would indicate this. Other expressions like, “It was 300 meters tall”, or “The river was very wide” required a combination of gestures. You needed to be more subtle, as this was something that would be done at a podium. Once the students were comfortable doing that, I brought out the Charades game I had prepared a few months ago but never got to use.

I printed out a list of compound words and arranged four of them on index cards. The students were responsible for pantomiming the actions to get the rest of the students to guess. No hints like ’sounds like’ or counting words was allowed. The list I found was from a book I bought. Some of the clues were difficult. I did enjoy the students effort in getting past the ridiculousness of acting out a bunch of actions in front of a class. Everyone tried after they saw I was willing to look silly doing the material as well. Some of the students were very clever in presenting hints too. That game ran long, and the whole class was shouting out answers and trying to guess the clues.

It was nice. I think the bonding in the room between students increased, and they will feel much more confident with their peers in the future. I know their is a professor that does this EXACT same activity in class after a mid-term examination to let the students blow off steam and to get the groups of students into groups that will study together for the rest of the semester. I’ve used similar bonding techniques in classes. Persistent pairings, group and competitive class exercises, and games for building rapport. I thought that charades would be a little too silly for middle school students, but it worked really well in this particular instance. I might adapt it for both my elementary and university classes.

To break up the monotony of having the same class week after week in the camps, we were given a chance to do something a little different for a long block in the afternoon. We were told last week that there was going to be a “Golden Bell” game in class. Of course, all I wanted to know is if it was in class, or as a group. If it was a giant group, then half the teachers would never need to lift a finger. There wouldn’t be enough time for all the teachers to read more than a question before we ran out of students getting correct answers in this trivia game. Normal Golden Bell rules are “You make a mistake, you are out.” Of course, with the different levels of the camp, it would be really dumb to do one giant game.

Some of the other foreign teachers have more active campus assistants. Some of the campus assistants were worried that the game would run too long, so they offered to do a “warm up” portion. Not my campus assistant. It was all me. I had to emcee the entire game for the class I teach in the afternoon. I really like Golden Bell games, but this was bordering on excessive. The warm up I did was letting the students decorate their personal white board, and putting them in strategic locations around the room to deter cheating. Once that was finished, the game got started

It was a long hour and a half class with me asking questions. All of them were first person questions with multiple choice answers in the vein of: “I am a fruit. I am delicious. I have a hard orange peel. What am I? A) Apple B) Watermelon C) Orange D) Cherry.”

Seeing as one mistake could doom someone to falling behind never to be in contention again, I modified the rules a little bit. The students could answer in one of two ways. If they got the multiple choice answer correct by writing the letter, they got a single point. If they wrote the answer and spelled the entire thing correctly, they got two points. If they got any part of it wrong, they got no points. This rewarded students with confidence and good spelling. If you thought you knew how to spell the word, you could go for the extra point and hope someone ahead of you got it wrong so you could catch up. The ultra-competitive students could try for double points every round, and only the best would win in the end. There was a bit of strategy for the game, and it kept everyone interested.

The classroom I was teaching in had a dozen active and noisy students, so I had to keep the interest level up so that the game didn’t descend into chaos. I would do a little dance, or make little “Jeopardy” sounds while the students worked to give them a little time. I do not get nervous in front of students, even when I am doing slightly silly stuff to entertain them. I nearly fell of the stage three or four times as I moved around because it was so small. That kept the students always watching me. I have a large, commanding voice, but I haven’t taught a large group of kids that required me to use it for such a continuous time. I needed water after nearly every third question to keep my voice from going hoarse. The kids were having fun though.

For the first six rounds, I had four students that got every question correct, spelled everything correct, and had perfect scores. This is what can kill the fun for all the other students. Once students fall far enough behind they’ll simply sabotage the game if they know they can’t win. Very few students play for pride. The scores were all written on the board, and they could see how far they were falling behind. With the multiple points possible for scoring, some people could catch up, and even a student with a correct answer could potentially make a minor mistake and fall behind. We took a break mid-way though the game, and when the students came back I ramped up the difficulty of the questions to weed out the top few students and make sure I had a clear winner.

I read and tallied all the scores between each round while my campus assistant…watched from the back of the room. So annoying.

The game ended with a student who scored nearly a perfect score. She had her nearest competitor beat by two questions at least, and she had spelled all but one question correct. She won the prize, and will receive a gift at the end of the camp, and a recognition of her excellence. Since I didn’t need to come up with the questions, and I had plenty of options for difficulty and judging, and I didn’t have to emcee with any other teachers, I really liked this Golden Bell. Sometimes they can be a terrible waste of time, but this one was really fun.

Next time we will do a market activity, where students will bring in and sell different items. This will require a lot less work from me, and a lot more bartering from the kids. My voice could use the rest.

Thursdays are normally a light two hour sprint in class. Listen to a few speeches. Help plan some short essays. Go home and just rest up. Exercise.

Not this Thursday. Someone in the research and planning office offered to bribe the entire Freshman English program with pizza to say, “Thank you for teaching these weird classes this break.” I’m not sure how everything got started, but I heard about pizza being offered for everyone in the office for free yesterday and I changed my plans so that I could stick around and take advantage of the offer. I waited around for an extra hour, working on my syllabus and other class material for next semester while my stomach growled for the promised pizza.

There were more people in the office today than I’ve seen since before last semester’s finals. Everyone in the office was waiting for the pizza to be delivered. When it finally arrived, there was a mad scramble for paper cups, things resembling plate, and any other eating tools necessary to consume the seven pizzas that were delivered. Pickles, cheese sauce, and slices were distributed and the entire office sat around munching on slices and trying to do something productive without getting oily hands on things they needed to keep looking good.

Everyone took a big hit on the number of pizzas available, but by the time I left there were still enough slices for two boxes to be full. It must be the punishing heat outside causing the hot pizza to feel like a brick in your stomach, because I knew immediately I wasn’t going to be able to finish off my normal amount. It was a nice gesture for those people that had finished their classes this week and were about to go on vacation. I have an extra long camp schedule this month, so I won’t be going on vacation like some of the other people in the office are this week.

More time to myself to plan. More things to do.

I have one class responsible for a presentation at the end of their camp. They have a high level of English for their age, so I will need to present materials we’ve worked on for either a video, or a class presentation. We’ve been working on some Aesop fables that were turned into simple plays. The first class with the plays the students performed them. The second class the students prepared costumes related to their parts in the play, with narrators preparing any props in the story.

Today I needed another activity to kill time. I don’t teach these students any other topic. If I wanted them to perform the same material over and over, I could have them ready to go in a single day, but they are too impatient and bored to continue to do the activities week after week. The plays are short, and easy to memorize on purpose so they can be expanded upon and used in different ways. The students all know the story. Comprehension isn’t an issue, so they can do more than just read a bunch of words they don’t understand.

Today I asked the students to write an alternate ending to each of their stories. They worked with their partners to add “what happened next.”

Some of the groups made of girls were extremely morbid. “Everyone gets in a fight. Everyone dies. Then there are ghosts. They haunt the other characters. They also die. The end.”

The other group of girls were non-confrontational,  but still creepy. “Well, everyone becomes friends…except the mean hunter. He starves to death. Then the animals use his bones for a new home.”

The boys had a hard time figuring out what I wanted them to do, but ended up putting a string of random events that approached a resolution of a story.  After this, I’ll take their drafts, write up the final versions with their weird endings, then have them perform it in front of a video camera. It will take some time to perform. They need to work on their blocking and getting used to working with a microphone.

Well, that’s the plan, at least.

Whenever I start a class with students I don’t know, I start small, with achievable goals to spur on student’s confidence. The first day of a camp, I’ll assign homework to establish that, “Yes, you will need to do homework, but you will be rewarded if you finish it.” The model of “One point for any effort, Two points for acceptable effort, and three points for exceptional effort” is successful enough to hold not even for my elementary camps, but all the way through to my college courses. The students in college compete for grades. The elementary school students compete for stickers. It works all the same, but older children are better at accepting more abstract rewards.

Trying to assign homework after the first week is impossible if the students don’t get into the habit of expecting it. If you don’t treat homework like an part of the class, you won’t get much productive work done in class either. When you start treating a camp like it is worth blowing off, you’ll just get trapped in a expectation that the camp is a play land with English speaking babysitters = AKA HELL.

The way the camp I work at is set up, each set of students spends three hours with me, and two hours with other teachers. What the other teachers do in their classes doesn’t relate to my class. I teach them reading, science, and math skills. The other teachers have classes with story telling or drama focuses. The last hour rotates to different activities, like going to a post office, or going to the doctor’s office. I am in charge of  the doctor’s office game. I have plastic props and hospital gowns. There is also a set of rubber gloves for each of the students. I hate the rubber gloves, since the students use them as spit-based dodge balls of germ warfare. I also try to limit the exposure the students have to the little plastic props they have. The less practice a sadistic boy has practicing cutting up a classmate with a fake scalpel, the better.

If I don’t want to do the activities they’ve provided, I can always make something based on the theme myself. My stop gap solution for the first class when I ran out of things to do is to pass out a word search. This is the “lazy teacher” solution to every problem in a long class. If you didn’t prepare enough materials, “WORD SEARCH!” I am not down with that style teaching anymore. I don’t do word searches unless it is a class where I got caught by complete surprise. Anything is better than a stupid word search.

I went through a series of activities after I ran short the first class. I found a few different ways to use materials regardless of level, refined how I would present the materials, and still ended up a little short with what I wanted to do. I brainstormed with the other person running the doctor activity to see how they are going to present their materials. I’ve also finished teaching the youngest, lowest level students for the rest of the camp, so I don’t have to come up with quite so much stuff to babysit them. I’d rather be left tap dancing and going over different material than have twelve students doing word searching in my class.

I probably hold myself to a high standard simply because I have a lot of experience dealing with both children and parents. Students in other classes are definitely being exposed to different teaching styles and lots of accents, but also a little different level of enthusiasm. I’ve walked in on a few classes in the middle of word searches already, and that’s what got me to stop using them in my class. If every class I see used one once, and their teacher used them during their 3 hour lessons, they’d get burnt out on them really quickly. I’d be annoyed if I looked in my child’s binder and found a few dozen searches after the camp was over. I don’t want to be “that guy”.