I had a Moment

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Sometimes when I walk around the city, am in my apartment, or during a lull in the classroom, I think and get those MOMENTS. Of clarity. Of the realization that I am here for a reason, I am in another country, and I am doing well. I’m doing IT. Daily life can get in the way of that not so profound thought, and I’m getting more adept at capturing those little moments. I carry a notebook of sorts around with me, a gift I received before embarking upon this journey, and while one of the reasons I love it so much is because it makes me feel like a spy, another more important reason is that it helps me to record those MOMENTS. So here’s to them; if it seems disjointed, just pretend that you’re in my brain. Welcome to my world.

The classroom keeps on being a wonderful place for me in the mornings, and an ‘okay I guess I’ll be here and teach’ in the afternoons. My Kindergartners are lovely, just lovely, and they grow on me more every day. Sometimes it literally seems as though they grow on me because the girls love to be all up in my business and cling to me, jump on my lap, smooth my hair and face, and call me ‘mommy.’ One little girl looked at me and said very seriously ‘Miss K, I really wish you were Korean’, which I didn’t know if it was meant to be complimentary or not. I don’t think she knew either.

The Kindys wow me daily with the intelligence they exhibit in a second language. I didn’t learn the things they are learning in my own language until I was a couple years older. And they rage right through it all. We have been focusing on planets lately as space is our upcoming End-Of-Year performance topic, which reminds me how much I love space. In fact, teaching all of the basics makes me realize how much information is out there and inspires me to want to learn more about it…with little kids…because their excitement level is rival to my own. Anyway, one of my students LOVES space and the planets, his favorite being Uranus, which he shouts out. A lot. (Uranus!! It’s my favorite!!) We had been discussing the orbit of different planets around the sun and how long it takes for different planets (88 days for Mercury, 224.7 days for Venus, etc.) James had the few we talked about down pat in a matter of minutes. He was absent on Monday and came back bursting at the seams because during his sick down-time he researched the rest of the planets orbital path around the sun and had every planet memorized, even Pluto the dwarf planet. The numbers were down to the decimals, like the thousandth place.

Those kinds of kids make me LOVE being a teacher. Another thing that makes me LOVE being a teacher is that I can sing pretty much any time I want. You know if you’re doing something, or saying something and it makes you think of a song? And you just want to sing it out loud? (My brother and I inherited this gene from our father who has been doing this for as long as I can remember.) When you’re teaching a Kindergarten class, you can. And they love it. And if they too know the song, they will unabashedly join in. This prompted me to start doing ‘song madlibs’ with them. Madlibs is the game where you get a paragraph with all the nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. taken out of it and you have to think of new words to add in, making for a hilarious mixed up story. I started doing that with songs; taking out all the adjectives, nouns, verbs from songs, like Umbrella by Rhianna for instance. BIG HIT. I love when you do something with a kid and you can both genuinely laugh together. The songs we create are hilarious because the words that little kids think of in their second language are amazing. “You can stand under my belly button, you can stand under my belly button, utton, utton, eh, eh. These fancy smelly feet will never punch in between….”

I have much more to pass on to you all about the past few weeks (gotta pass along some moments, eh?), but I’ll try and do some more of this ‘blogging’ tomorrow. I am off to the Korean War Museum to see some dead bodies in celebration of the great holiday known as Halloween.

Much love to all back home.