Joel: I spent most of today arm-wrestling with eleven year olds - and WINNING! I've been teaching the grade six classes comparatives (am bigger than, is stronger than, etc.) and we felt this would be a good way to get everyone interested. First of all, we set up a small competition amongst the kids to see who "is stronger than" who. Then, the winner in each class got to take me on. And don't even ask - of course I didn't let them win. You should know me better than that. More and more though, I'm thinking this is the key to good teaching, whatever the subject. HAVE LOTS OF FUN! I'm finding that if I try to come up with ways to keep myself entertained, the children have a good time and stay interested. Maybe the age gap isn't really as big as it first appears.

My Bugsy Malone project is now well and truly underway. I was glad to see Kim-Yin (the boy I said reminded me of myself) come along to audition and I manged to assemble a cast of 22 kids. I had a meeting with them late last week to give out the parts, tell them the story (with occasional translation) and show them the trailer for the 70's film which I managed to download. Kim-Yin is gonig to be Fat Sam and I took a bit of a gamble by asking a 3rd grade boy to play Bugsy. So, he's 7 or 8 years old but he seemed really good. By the end of last week I was starting to think I'd gone a bit mad and had taken on too much: these are 7-11 year old Korean kids who would probably rather be doing Cinderella for a school play - one teacher told me at lunch that this was the kind of thing they usually do. But now I've had two rehearsals and I can't believe how good the two boys I've mentioned are. They don't have to remember all the lines because it's going to be performed on a large outdoor stage and I'm going to prerecord all the dialogue. But straight away just reading the thing they seem to a have a much better understanding of the words and than I expected - combined with a natural flair for performance. I'm now feeling pretty excited about it.

Last weekend wasn't too bad. I was pretty done in by the end of it though and I'm still feeling a bit tired now after not having a proper weekend. At least we're off most of next week for Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving). I'll be finishing school early on Thursday to go and meet my parents at the airport. The last few weeks have flown by and now I'm dead excited that they're coming. We've found out about loads of events going on around Seoul next week to celebrate Chuseok so it's really the perfect time to come out here. Also, I hear the British heatwave came to a pretty spectacular end just as our Indian sumer was beginning. It's now between 25 and 27 in the afternoons and I had to root out my sunnies! I just hope my folks don't bring the weather with them.