the gossip girls want to climb Gwanak-san with me.

I reciprocate.

My after school class (2 hours after school on both Tuesdays and Wednesdays from now on) starts tomorrow. I finally got the attendance list today and was promptly disappointed by it. I'm disappointed in myself for that.

I'd assumed that my audience would be the really enthusiastic 2nd graders whom I've been missing these months. That's partly the case, and there's also a few really enthusiastic 1st and 3rd graders in there, of various English proficiency levels. There are a few 2nd grade faces that I'll be really happy to see again.

There are also a fair number of 2nd graders who were forced into signing up for an after school class by their homeroom teachers and who chose my class as the least of all the evils. They most likely won't be very enthusiastic.

There's also 하태원 (Ha Tae-Won). I taught him in 1st grade c-level last year; he's in 2nd grade now, still lowest level. And that's fine, I don't mean to deprecate the c-level students. And I don't actually mean to deprecate Tae-Won either. It's just that he's very hard to teach. His English level is undoubtedly the lowest of any of my students. He rarely understands directions and rarely utters an intelligible word in either English or Korean. If I ask him a question, he generally responds with an extremely quiet mumble, and most of the time I've no idea what he's saying. He's painfully shy. He always pays attention in class but doesn't usually seem to follow what's going on.

I co-taught c-level with Shin-Jung last year, and she really hated Tae-Won. I hope I will never feel that way about a student, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't relieved when I no longer had to teach Tae-Won. I think I'd be happy to work with him one on one, but he's so hard in a classroom setting. His pace is so much slower than his classmates, and they resent him for it. If I slowed down to his pace, I would lose the attention of everyone else in the class. What to dooooooooooo.

Choi Yena is teaching him this year (in regular classes, that is). I admire the way she interacts with him. She's so patient, and she seems to be able to get through to him and understand what he is saying in a way that I couldn't. He always comes to her desk during free time to practice for his speaking test. And so I think: He really does want to learn English, much more than most of his classmates. Surely I can be patient enough to help him. Surely I can find a productive way to incorporate him into my after school class.

Gah.

Anyway.