Three Things Thursday

1. One of my kindergarten students has been a total disaster lately. I'm told she's quite clever, but I never see it. Her hand is never up for questions, her head isn't even up to look! She is completely disengaged. When I try to engage her by helping her to slowly answer a question and I give her a star, she tells me to take it away because she knows she's wrong. She is clever, so clever she knows when I'm just asking her something too easy. She finishes the day having barely any stars then complains to her mum.

So today I was insanely nice to her. She came to school dressed in a princess dress and I referred to her as princess and gave her way more attention than usual. And, it totally worked. She was answering questions, reading along, everything. But naturally, the other students noticed it was unfair and when she wasn't picked, she was jealous and would withdraw herself from the lesson again. So it will be a fine balance to keep everyone involved. Especially when my kindergarten class is well known to be 'bitchy'.

2. I gave the dictatorship nicknames today based on animals combined with their actual names (which I will leave out as always, but trust me, they are punny). It all fell apart when our kangaroo claimed he wanted to produce himself. The question was "what would you produce?" as in make, or grow. His response got laughs since it implied pregnancy, which he though was funny. Then after awhile of looking at the baby kangaroo in the pouch of his doodle on the board he requested all nicknames, and their accompanying doodles, be erased from the board. The other students liked theirs and didn't want to see them go. As the dictator, I erased only his.

I then tired the same thing in the democracy. Here the nicknames were food themed. The kids even nicknamed me Te-egg (Teacher+egg). Spaghetti was a producer of Jelly, but she wanted to buy some Te-egg, Banana is willing to trade her Te-egg but only for a Sausage. Thus Spaghetti traded Jelly to Jam for Sausage and traded Sausage to Banana for Te-egg. All the students took part in this verbal exercise strictly adhering to our new nicknames. Then we ended up doing tongue twisters and they loved every moment of it -and so did I.

3. My autobiography got weirdly written by the super-class that is shared between the three teachers today. It was actually part of the assignment to interview your teacher for the following. When and where were you born? ...so they know how old I am now, or more specifically how not old I am. Then what I studied and why I wanted to teach them. After learning that I studied government and international relations -and explaining what that is- one student took something out of his backpack. They were old propaganda flyers distributed by North Korea from planes in the 1960s-1980s. These flyers were seen as a threat to South Koreans and could be turned over for a reward at schools. Meaning there are hardly any left. He tells me I can photocopy it on Tuesday. Naturally, I will share it here. One depicted the US as a zombie-vampire thing, it's weird to see how they kind of became ture lately...