Today I am just, like, SO popular.  My co-teacher, always one to personalize a lesson, followed up an intro on "Do you like (name of food)"...

Co-teacher: "Do you like me?"
Students (half-heartedly): "Yes, I do."
Co-teacher: "Do you like Laura?"
Students (enthusiastically shouting): "Yes, I do!!!"

Not that them liking me is the point, at all, but I still had to try hard not to look smug.

This co-teacher, who's been around the school for almost four years, also told me that the other teachers like me but didn't like the previous foreigner who would come in to work hungover on Mondays and also used to fight with everyone.  Now, I've had my fair share of disagreements, though they've almost all been with my bosses and very rarely with co-teachers (who have generally been really good).  And I may not come in hungover, but I'm not even a little bit of a morning person; when 9:00 rolls around, it's kind of like, "What's going on?  Why are there all these kids in my room?  Why are they screaming?  Will someone PLEASE tell these kids to be quiet?  Whaddaya mean, that's my job?"

The previous foreign teacher must have really been a piece of work.  Either that or, more likely, my co-teacher was making up stuff to flatter me.

While it doesn't matter if kids like me, I think they should at least find the classes mostly interesting - not always, but mostly - and this is especially true with the little ones who aren't included in the national curriculum (since English officially starts in grade three).  So there's a boy in grade two named Dong-hun.  There's also a boy in grade three named Dong-hun, and between the two of them I'm starting to think that's seriously an unlucky name.  Both are real troublemakers with attitude problems, though the grade two kid is much worse; he's pretty much already like a teenager, hating everything and sitting there pretending he's too cool for every activity.  I taught him in the afterschool class last semester and pretty much the only time he ever smiled was while he was cheerfully colouring in his entire book in whatever colour the kid sharing his coloured pencils wanted to use - the second another kid at the table expressed an interest in whatever colour Dong-hun was using, he'd hold onto that pencil until the end of the class as if his life depended on it.  A real piece of work, that one.

So today was the first time I did numbers with them, and the lesson included a standard ESL find-your-partner game (which was totally new to them) and a song.  The song is, quite frankly, terrible.  It's a three-minute song with literally nothing in it but counting to ten, fifteen times over.  I chose it in first semester because I couldn't find anything else about numbers that was easy enough for them (okay, except Ten Little Indians, which is both really fast and also kind of awful).  Much to my surprise, the first graders LOVED the song and always asked for it at the beginning of class.  Maybe they just felt good that they knew all the lyrics, or maybe they liked the slightly silly pictures of penguins wearing glasses, pigs holding money and a gorilla reading a newspaper.  I can't pretend to understand how the mind of a six-year-old works.

The notable thing here is that I actually caught Dong-hun smiling and participating in BOTH activities.  Mind you, during the game he had to be dragged to the front of the class by his partner, a very determined pre-ajumma wearing a pink shirt and pigtails.  Then he stopped singing the song when he saw me look at him.  Still, it was something.  I feel like I've been educationally successful today.