Soshall

These past two evenings I went to the singing rooms (Noraebang, KTV, Karaoke) twice!  Friday night I went with some of my 11th grade students for a couple hours, and then yesterday it was part of a birthday celebration for one of the filipino families kids. I think the larger the group that goes, the more fun it tends to be. 
My students sang a lot of K-pop songs, and this helped me practice my Hangul (Korean writing) skills. I still read too slowly to sing along except to the slowest of songs.  One of the things we (my previous co-workers) encountered before when doing Karaoke/Noraebang in Korea was realizing that so many songs have bad lyrics.. worse than we thought. I'm happy that almost all the songs my students and filipino friends chose had good lyrics, if a bit cliche/sappy. The Carpenters are pretty classic like that. Somehow I kept getting the microphone last night, and yet today I still have a voice. Maybe talking loudly to my 5/6th grade science class has made my chords a bit stronger.

These past couple weeks at the school have been particularly rough for a number of reasons.  There's the first quarter grades to complete.. which, if I'd graded things as they were submitted, could have been easier. We also had some theft to deal with.. and as a very small school the injustice seems just a little sharper, I think. We still have to move and breathe around the likely suspect(s) and that's just uncomfortable. It was also hard for the administration to take firm action because of previous engagements/conflicts. One other point of strain for me personally was attempting to teach Federal Bureaucracy. I don't understand it, and honestly feel a bit of an aversion to the thing, and yet I was presenting it. Ugh. I could feel the mutual frustration of the class.

One of my resolutions in coming here was to make sure the students had a good level of writing composition (essays and such), and that hasn't really been happening yet.  Essays take a lot of time to grade well, and taking time to write the essay slows down how much material we can cover. Making the US Gov't class into a semester course is already rushing, so it is hard to figure out what should be dropped.  But drop things we will! This new quarter will have essay days, perhaps once a week, where the students will write use the 50minutes in class to write.  I'm sure some of the students will be discouraged at first.. so please remember them in your prayers. English isn't the first language for most of them, and natural English grammar doesn't happen. Even my grammar is lacking, and I don't feel competent enough to correct their writing well.

Weather update: The past week has gotten progressively warmer! Overnight the temperatures didn't even dip into freezing. Jackets still seem a little too warm, but I think my blood has also gotten thicker from the cold period before they turned on the building heating.  Since the heating is on in my dorm it has been quite warm indoors. I wake up sweating sometimes and have to open the window to make it comfortable. With the heating turned on all over the city, the air pollution has also increased significantly. One of my students had breathing trouble this past week, and it seems like everyone is suddenly getting coughs and colds. The primary source of heat in the area is through burning coal, so the coal smoke goes up and everywhere (unless there is a good breeze). I just did some reading up on it, and it seems that it isn't tooo great of a threat to health, but still not optimal. Just got the text update on my phone for tomorrow: 2C low and 18C high, practically balmy!

Finally, I need some serious routines.