So last Friday my school decided to have a theme day to teach the students some Western culture, namely Canada Day (July 1st) and Independence Day (July 4th). Well basically the lessons for me turned out to be a complete disaster because the way I planned my lesson just totally did not happen. First I had major technical difficulties so forcing my students to listen to Leann Rimes sing The Star Spangled Banner until their brains about exploded with American nationalism failed. Next, my trivia portion was lacking in interest and teach-ability to the munchkins which inevitably caused my Canada/America Jeopardy game to not be possible. So my day just transgressed into a series of improvised lessons including pictures of beavers, football, and San Francisco and teaching my students that Canada is just merely America’s hat.

Though sounding strange these improvised lessons did prompt my student Grace to write an excellent story about how I am actually President Obama who is secretly Canada’s national animal, the Beaver (sounds like the beginning to an excellent international conspiracy), that used my Beaver-esque dam building expertise to construct the Golden Gate Bridge. Hopefully you can see why I enjoy having this student in my class…oh man, how I love ridiculous stories.

Besides discovering that I am a conspiratorial beaver from Canada, this day of failed lesson plans and ridiculous improvised lessons had two redeeming qualities:

1) In Korea there seems to be a bewildering amount of Canadians here that gang up and prey upon Americans that are ignorant of anything to do with their country other than they say silly things such as “eh” or “aboot”, they love hockey, and Alex Trebek hails from there. So hopefully to their joy I have finally learned something about Canada, but most likely to their dismay what I learned about Canada just reaffirmed my suspicions that I don’t need to know anything about Canada because Canada just doesn’t really matter outside of Canada. Sorry Canada, but outside of hosting an upcoming winter Olympics I don’t think I have to know to much about you.

2) In an effort to look festive I taped a paper American flag to my hat, which I discovered made me look exquisitely white trash (could only have been topped if I had taped a Confederate flag to my head). This prompted my students to start attaching American flags indiscriminately the personal affects resulting in me having some awesome pictures of something that appears to look like a Korean-White Trash family photo opp. Check it out!

Coming soon, stories about how shortly after this photo opp, I jumped on a train with Marc that was 6 hours of locomotive drinking shinanegans while enroute to spend the day starring at North Korea, while hearing propaganda about North Korea. ASSA!