Promotion Day

Yesterday was the school's annual promotion day, and for our manager, the most stressful day of the year. For us, it was just a minor inconvienence that we had to go to work on a Saturday and give a minute-long speech about something to do with the curriculum.

Parents of potential new students were invited to see what ECC is all about, meet the teachers, see the classrooms, learn what books we use and so on, in the hope that they'd open their wallets. The majority of the school's money comes from this day so the manager was keen to make us seem as good as the other schools in the area (because from what I gather, other schools have a better reputation.. damn you to hell, Poly.)

We didn't see many of the potential new kinder recruits, but there were a few there: two boys with boundless energy and a propensity to throw things, a girl barely out of nappies who cried every time a foreigner looked at her, and a pretty odd kid who, while playing in her own little world, balanced a rotating assortment of plastic fruit on her head. The parents, the dads especially, all looked a bit bored, and apparently only a few signed up on the day. So we'll see how that goes.

After promotion day we went to a bar we'd not been to before, only a few minutes' walk away, but pretty well disguised. It's called Hey Hey Hey. I'd seen the sign for ages, but was unaware until recently what it actually was. On the sign there's a picture of seventies cartoon character Fat Albert, as in the one voiced by Bill Cosby, remember? I had to look it up. So, yeah. There's a bar in Seoul named after the catchphrase of a long-forgotten black American morbidly obese cartoon character. Interestingly inside the place there's no further reference to Fat Albert.

Open Lessons, Pepero Day

For the last month I've been teaching a 'special' lesson alongside my usual textbooks for two of my classes, at a significantly higher level than what the kids are used to, for the purpose of impressing their watching parents. We practiced every day, to the point that everybody became intensely bored with it and yearned for a return to the normal structure. But the parents don't want to see a standard lesson from the standard text book thereby giving an accurate representation of how their child is performing in school. No. They insist that we place them in battery cages and drill into their mushy heads twice a day the same regurgitated lesson for four long stultifying weeks.

Whatever. With my homeroom Cambridge 1 class we did the polar regions. I had them memorise how to spell Antarctica, where penguins live and who the first man to reach the north pole was, that sort of thing. We did the lesson last Thursday and it was a success, I think. No kids have quit yet, and I've been told that in the past, as a result of a substandard open lesson, they have.

Today I taught the prodigies in Harvard class the history of chocolate. They did quite well, considering they had to memorise and incorporate into sentences words like civilisation, conquistador, Xocolatl and Tenochtitlan (they're six). Jenny actually nailed 'Tenochtitlan' but came unstuck on the word 'milk'...

It was also unintentionally prescient of me to choose the history of chocolate as my open lesson, as today in Korea, it is Pepero Day. Although alliteratively connected, Peperos have nothing to do with poppies, and the celebrations are about as far removed from two minute silences as you're going to get. Peperos are biscuit sticks coated in chocolate, made by the Lotte conglomeration, given to "the special person in your life" on this day every year. Lotte thought up this celebratory day a few years ago, plumping for this date as written numerically it's 11/11, which, obviously, resembles four peperos. They're pretty basic to be honest, with little in the way of taste, but the kids can't get enough. And I, being their beloved teacher, have been showered with them. This flash video will explain nothing but click it anyway for further proof that Asia is just insane.


Remember: Dulce et decorum est... Pepero...