Planning Monday

Pepero Day: I can't remember if I explained Pepero already--they are chocolate dipped cookie sticks. They are long and skinny and look like the number 1. So, Lotte (a big brand here that owns almost everything...) has decided to capitalize on this and make a "Lotte Holiday" (like Hallmark Holidays...) and say that 11/11 is Pepero Day--it looks like 4 Pepero sticks. It is kind of like Valentine's Day where students bring in a box of Pepero for their friends.

 My co teacher (COT) and I wanted to try something new with one of our classes to give more focused attention on the students. During the online training I have to do, I saw some strategies for co teaching and one was "parallel teaching" where we split the class and each take a smaller group and teach the same material. Well, she split the class based on ability and she took the lower group. My group enjoyed the lesson and then we met back as a whole group for a game. Afterwards, my COT said that her group noticed the class was split on ability and were not as responsive because they found themselves in the 'low' group. I didn't realize she was going to split them that way actually, and she came to class late so we weren't able to talk about how we were going to split up the class. She said she did not like that idea and we didn't try adjusting it (not splitting by level) for any of the other classes.

After school I came home and relaxed a little bit. Then I went to go meet Krystle in Hapjeong. We had seen a cafe the other day we thought we would try because it had wifi. I arrived before Krystle and checked it out--it only had coffee and we were looking for dinner. So, when she arrived I took her down some of the side streets I walked with Kwang Min before and we found a place. The only drawback was that they didn't have a smoking room and people could just smoke anywhere in the cafe. We had already looked at a few places and trying to find vegetarian options and wifi was getting a bit difficult, so we stayed put. We ordered a margarita pizza and it was pretty good.

We ate and then we did some research for our Christmas trip. We originally were thinking Bali, but found out that it is their rainy season. So we spent most of our time looking at other countries--cost of flights and things to do at other places. Now Singapore is in the running.