Last Friday was the final day of my speaking test preparation and review classes.  I’d only had one snag throughout the course of the week in terms of anything going wrong.  Specifically, the Tuesday classes missed the lesson because Wednesday’s classes got moved to Tuesday due to the elections voting national holiday and “too many missed Wednesdays” of classes throughout the semester.  I ended up photocopying the handouts and giving them to my co-teacher who assured me he’d tell the guys everything they needed to know about the upcoming speaking test, and that he’d review everything too–though how he was going to do that during the 10 minutes every morning where homeroom teachers take attendance I don’t know, as that was when he was planning on doing it.

Thinking that I’d made it to Friday with nothing else happening to make doing the review classes difficult I noticed two things outside the building where my classes are held: hundreds of kids from the adjoining middle school out on the playing field with loudspeakers, and blood donation buses . . . and I felt a sinking feeling.

The loudspeakers were really ‘special’ cause they made this fantastic echoey reverberation effect that bounced off the other buildings surrounding the playing field and then smacked right into the windows of my classroom.  It’s amazing how much power these things have . . .

Luckily they weren’t as loud as I feared at first, and I didn’t have to find a co-teacher to explain to someone at the middle school that external noises shouldn’t interfere with me being able to be heard without having to bellow like a drill sergeant while teaching.  Woo . . .

As for the blood donation buses, none of my co-teachers had mentioned to me anything about blood donations and how they might effect my class times for Friday . . . and I just knew in my gut that it was going to, and I was right.  Just before lunch, one of my classes was suddenly interrupted by a student knocking on the door to tell the guys it was their turn at the buses.   Nice . . . apparently there wasn’t even any effort made to make a schedule for classes going to the buses (that, or nobody had told me about it) cause no one knew how long it would take for each class.  When my co-teacher looked at me, I just shrugged and said “Whatever . . . it’s only test review class–it’s not that important.”  And then all the guys in my class zoomed out the door to go do whatever they had to do.

Here’s a shot of the students who were running the paper work tables.  Apparently the deal was fill out the form, agree to give blood, and they’d pay you with a 3,000won certificate and a choco pie–all in return for 400ml of your blood.  After seeing the operation I jokingly began referring to the buses as “vampire buses” . . . the guys thought this was incredibly funny, and as they came back into the classroom in a slow trickle I kept asking them if they’d become ‘vampires’ after giving blood . . . one of the guys that I think has ADHD decided he’d show me that he had become a vampire and jokingly tried to bite my neck–yikes, lol.

And that was my Friday . . . I haven’t been blogging much lately cause Julianne and I have been busy with a special project that I’m going to blog about soon.

Well, time to hit the hay cause tomorrow is the first day of the second round of speaking tests for the guys.

J