Open wide!

I shudder at the thought.

Today Alice approached me with the calendar in hand - never a good sign. "Is December 6th a good day for your open class?" "Sure, sounds fabulous." Shoot me.

The dreaded open class. The mom's pile in to the already too small classroom and observe the forty minute lesson where the children are either angelic or little hellions.. and from my recent track record I'm none too excited. Another problem: they do not want their children speaking Korean, obviously, since it is an English language school. Well well well, if only I could get that system going.

As luck would have it I have begun a serious Korean language crackdown in my classes. I'll describe the five year old's system. I know it'll be a tough transition so here are the rules: Sharing Time, from 9:45 until 10:25 is strictly English Time. I began today by writing all of "apple" table's names on one side of the whiteboard and all of "ice cream" table's names on the other. Anytime any child utters even a word of Korean they get an X next to their name. By the end of the forty minute class the table with the smaller number of X's get's two stars next to their table name, also written on the board. Complicated, I know, but you'll get through this. As per usual, the table with the most stars at the end of the day gets two stickers and the other table only gets one so this is a big deal thank you very much. And two stars right off the bat in the morning is a highly coveted prize.

Today ice cream table had 10 X's and apple table had 14. I hope to see drastic improvements over the next few weeks. Slowly but surely I'll force English Time upon them until the entire day, yes, I mean business, is English Time.

Hopefully by the time my open class comes around in two and a half weeks we'll have graduated to Language Arts English Time as well as Sharing Time English Time. Or at least Mommy-in-the-room English Time. Canada Time??

In other news, my professor recommended that I apply to the states for graduate work. Why? Because the programs in Canada aren't so great and any graduate work I do here wouldn't transfer over to a PhD program in America; I'd have to do the same work that I would if I just started right now. There are a number of problems I see here. First, I'm a lazy sloth who always trys to find the easy way out. Second, I haven't written my GREs and I called the Korean testing centre today but they hung up on my English speaking self. Fourth, I can't count so maybe I'm kidding myself by taking up demography. Third, I don't really really know what I want to do with my life. Fifth, I miss my mommy. Sixth, I'm a cheap bastard and don't want to incur student loads. Seventh, it would be a lot more work that I'd have to get done right now. Eighth, if I don't do a PhD I'll probably want to work for a Canadian research company, or likely the Canadian government so why not study in Canada? Maybe that's a cop out.

Mrs. Rudolph, my fifth grade choir teacher, told me that if I quit now then I'd always be a quitter.