Halloween 2009

I was slightly worried about whether we'd have a Halloween party at school this year, since the holiday was actually on a Saturday and the school is going through rough times, financially and regarding its reputation. I asked Heather last month if we would have a party the Friday before Halloween, and she said, yes, she'd be "buying candy." I was afraid, even had a stress dream about it, that she really meant she would just buy some candy, and it would be given to the kids at the counter or in class, and classes would go on as usual. Luckily, she probably either wanted to have a real party, or figured the backlash from the kids would be too much of a hassle, so we got a day of playing instead of teaching. Here are some pictures and video:

This is Albert under the hood.


That's Danny and Melanie in the "ghost house," except the lights had been turned on to fix some of the plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling.


Andrew in a pensive moment.



I see this chick every day, but I don't know her name. Nice picture, though.

I don't know who this guy is, but he has teeth.

A bunch of kids from my class and other classes watching the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror.

Not the best picture of me, but me as "Queen of the Nile" with some kids I don't even know.

My third-grade class playing some game. Plus an extra kid one of them brought along--the plaid one.

Lucille (formerly Kitty) and Jane (Mingyu's daughter)

Good ol' Kevin. I'm so glad I don't have his class anymore. It's nice to just talk to him in the hall.

More Simpsons

This is one of my fourth-grade classes. They came as terrorists. I think it's funny that Alex, as a terrorist, is still thinking about germs, and has a mask that looks like a cute little bear.

The same class attacking Leon (and Tom defending him, I guess). They love him.

Not the best picture of me, either, but you can at least see what the costume looks like. It was a rental.

This video is reasonably self-explanatory.

The first boy to come up to me for a treat is Johnes. Isn't he precious?

I think it's funny how at least half the kids have no idea what they're really supposed to say when they want candy on Halloween. Most of them were saying "trick or trick," and others were mixing up either word with "trip" or other words that sound similar to "trick" and "treat" (which, by the way, sound very similar to each other for them, due to the inability to pronounce the short i properly).

Actually, having the Halloween party is quite a draw on the energy, and most of the teachers were exhausted at best, and kind of pissed off at worst. Because the kids are so excited, and want to go get candy, see the ghost house, watch a movie, watch the Simpsons, or just play in the halls, it's hard to actually organize anything. But we all still feel responsible for our own kids, so with half of them in the class, and the other half wandering around, we feel torn and stressed all day.

Additionally, there was this riddle activity that I had to emcee, which I was technically told about, but the Korean teacher who told me about it did such a poor job that I wasn't even aware I was involved, until someone came and got me and they handed me a microphone. All I had to do was read off clues from the projector and call on kids to guess the answers for candy. Then they found that they needed more riddles so all fifty or so kids who were there got some candy, so I had to come up with a bunch of riddles on the spot. It was no big deal, but kind of stressful. I'd like to think I was pretty funny up there, but most people watching probably didn't get my comedic genius.

Finally, to add a little salt to the ol' stress wound, none of the foreign teachers were told that the middle school students were to continue with their regular classes, and we only found out about this when we saw one of the Korean teachers doing a class, and I asked Heather about it. She always manages to forget these details. So Leon and Emily had to teach a class at the end of the day, with no time to actually plan the lesson. I was lucky enough to have no middle school classes, so I kept watching the Simpsons with my kids and some other random ones.

On Saturday I went to Seoul with Leon and we met a friend of his from England there, as well as Emily and her boyfriend (now our new part time teacher) Michael (I call him Miker, because the kids do). We went to three areas of Seoul.

This is at the Ice Bar in Apkujeong. It was supposed to be a superheroes theme, but a lot of people already had different costumes:

This dude won the costume contest.

I went as a zombie schoolgirl, because I figured it'd be warmer than the Egyptian gear, what with the knee-high socks and long sleeved shirt. I was still freezing for the latter half of the night, though. It got cold in Korea wicked fast just now.

There was a little show at the bar:

We also hit up Hongdae and watched some people dancing on a balcony at the bar next door (everyone in our bar was thinking, we should have gone to THAT bar), then back to Itaewon for some kebab, which took forever to get, but was quite good.