Bragging Rights

1) Norfolk & Chance earned the "Hat Trick" last night at 3 Alley Pub's Quiz Night, first place three times in a row. Well done, us! Unfortunately, we have to take a miss the next couple of weeks--at least under that team name.

2) This week's class activity is "create your own superhero", something fun and relatively easy with which to end the year. So far, my favorite superhero is Whassup Man. Students name and provide the characteristics of their hero or villain by fillng in the blanks on a worksheet I stole from Simon and Martina and fixed up for my purposes. I take (or sometimes choose) volunteers to read about their superhero/villain aloud at the end of class. It's generally a humorous, nice way to end things up.

Most classes have one or two students that take shots at a disliked teacher or the principal; and a couple who make me into the superhero, angling for brownie points on the last day. I felt pretty good today that one student actually tried to describe my traits as a teacher: "TuttleTeacher can freeze students with his stopwatch", "TuttleTeacher can make students pay attention without using corporal punishment", "His television shows interesting videos".

3) My teaching--or my ego--got a more official boost today; the principal showed me a certificate naming me Seoul Office of Education 2010 NSET Teacher of the Year. My co-teacher said there are five teachers receiving the award; I don't know if she meant total, per division, per region or what. Anyway, recognition is nice. And the monetary prize is nice, too--don't know how much it is, but it's nice.

I don't know the criteria or the process that was involved, but I do know I was asked a few weeks ago to put together some sample lesson plans, and I gather this was at a late stage of the selection procedure. I also know that the evaluators of my "open class" gave me a perfect score; and that my school's English Department gave me an "A+".

So, those are some nice laurels to rest on over the holidays!