Baking Craziness and Speech Day

So I baked a ton last week, and although I already talked about it, I wanted to show you all pictures of my home baked goodness. Here are pictures of the banana extravaganza. In total, I baked four mini cakes/bread loafs and three mini pies. Oh, and we ate a second pie yesterday and the crust was perfect, I think it may have needed a rest in the fridge for awhile for the crust to soften.

Friday at the hagwon was speech day. Basically we had our classes as normal and went into the auditorium for the last 30 minutes of class. Michael and I put our classes together and had each student give their one minute speech about family and then we played the "speed game" where kids were given a vocabulary word and they had to describe it to the other kids so the kids could guess what the word was. If we had time at the end, we did our weekly talking where the kids ask each other questions and try to answer them in complete sentences.

Some of our kids did really well and others did not. One of my kids stood up on stage for 5 minutes and laughed. He refused to say anything. Finally, I called in the head teacher and she pulled him out of class. The kid in question is "Alexander," a demon child. He was Michael's problem last session and now I am stuck with him. I have a class called 1.4 with four kids ranging from 6-8 years old. The boys are serious problems and Alexander happens to be the worst of them. He never seems to be affected by yelling, hitting (the head teacher and hagwon director are allowed to, I am not), or any sort of punishment. I usually have to make him stand facing the wall on most days (5-10 minutes at a time, not the whole class). Anyway, I guess I am not surprised that he pulled this since his practice speeches have been just as bad.

I have one student named "Philip" who never talks in class. He is about 10 years old and is the only kid I have in my 2.4 class. I spend a lot of time asking him questions only to have to answer them myself. It is a torturous 50 minutes of trying to kill time with a kid who has no communication skills. One day, the director sat in on the class and Philip got so overwhelmed that he started to cry. I have had only a few kids cry on me so far and those were all 4-6 year-olds, so this was a bit startling for me. Friday's period with Philip was mixed with my 2.3 class so I had three kids in the auditorium and Michael had about 5-6. I thought Philip might be overwhelmed by all the kids, but to my surprise he fit right in. He had to be yelled at for talking during another kid's speech and he even gave his speech with relative ease. I looked over at one point and he was sitting with a few other boys and laughing with them. We had to do speech evaluations of all of the kids and I commented that this was the first time I had heard Philip say more than yes or no.

My favorite kids also happen to be the smartest kids in the class. The not-so-smart kids know that they are terrible at English so usually don't even bother. The smart kids are the ones that volunteer to answer every question and don't groan when I make them read. They never misbehave and hand me their homework with a smile. It's kind of weird having a mixture of angels and demons in the classroom, but there don't seem to be many kids that fall in between these two categories.

Today we took it easy. We slept in and went to E-Mart during rush hour for Gizmo's Catsrang. I did some reorganizing with the help of another hanging shelf for the "closet" and a shoe shelf for the entry/kitchen. For dinner I made a creamy vegetable stew with sweet potatoes, Asian eggplant, onions and carrots. The sweet potatoes I bought startled me because they are not orange here underneath the peel. They are white. I first thought they might not be potatoes, but once I boiled them, they turned yellow and mushy and tasted sweet.

No big plans for tomorrow. It's supposed to be rainy and in the forties, which I guess is an improvement from snowing and in the thirties that was Thursday and Friday. We will probably take a walk to Homeplus and maybe the new shops that opened in 2TopCity (same building that CGV is in) this week.