Saranghaeyo

I've recently taken to expanding my Korean linguistic skills via YouTube video lessons. In a few short weeks I've tripled my vocabulary and improved my pronunciation tenfold. It's great for getting around the city, but kinda awkard when people assume you're fluent and suddenly launch into full-fledged Korean conversation.

At the end of each lesson I make a point of quietly standing beside one of my kids at school the next day, and repeating whatever phrase I learned the night before. If they whip their head around and gasp "Hoh! Teacher! Korean!" then the lesson was a success. If they don't react, it means I'm saying something wrong.

Last weekend I finished a 10 minute lesson on the various ways to express "I love you" in Korean. Turns out that YouTube lesson was more useful than I thought.

Amidst a (rare) quiet moment with my 6th period Atlanta class, 5 year-old Catherine stopped writing and peered up at me from her desk to say "Teacher, saranghaeyo". The light went on in my head: all this time Catherine was telling me that she loves me. For weeks I've been wondering what the heck that kid's always saying. Anyway, my heart melted a little and I realized that I must be the easiest adult in the world to manipulate, because for the rest of the class we played Hangman. And then I gave them all stickers.

Overall, today was a good day. It was Tom teacher's birthday, so we had some delicious cake to celebrate, plus, he just found out that he scored in the 93rd percentile on his LSAT's. For some reason the rest of the foreign teachers reacted like proud parents when we heard the news, despite the fact that we're all the same age. I just can't fathom having the brain power to study the way that he did for the past couple of months, while working this job.

Anyway, I'm off to the gym in a bit, but I have news for you Canada: tomorrow is FRIDAY! In the comically sarcastic words of my friend Niki, "I'm not mad about it".