bread and butter

If this blog has anything resembling a running gag, it's me revealing the various gifts I receive from my employers for holidays such as Chuseok or the Lunar New Year. If this blog has another running gag in addition to that, it's me being self-deprecating and belittling the work I do. This post will have both of those things. My bread and butter.


First, it's Chuseok time again, or at least it was last week. And along with a 5 day weekend, I was given a gift. Well, let's not keep you waiting. What was it this year?

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Spam.

Lots of Spam. In fact, I'm quite confident it declaring that this is, for me, a lifetime supply of Spam. Has your boss ever given you a lifetime supply of anything? Hmmph. Didn't think so.

Moving on to the self-deprecation. There's a class I teach of elementary school students. These kids are all pretty bright, and the class can be quite difficult. It's a class where we read about a topic- volcanoes or Louis Braille, for example - and they are tested on their comprehension. So it's not explicitly teaching English as a language, rather they are learning about things in English. Their workbooks have what's called a KWL chart. The K stands for "know," and they are supposed to list the things that already know about the topic before we've read the unit. The W stands for "want," and they are supposed to list the things that they want to know about the topic. The L stands for "learned," and they are supposed to list the things that they have learned, after we have read the unit. This is a picture of what one student recently wrote in the "learned" section. When I first read it, I felt as though this wasn't just one student saying this, rather it was every student I've ever taught, maybe a thousand by now, screaming this into my face: