finishee!

Camp ended yesterday. I will miss parts of it (the cafeteria food was amazing!), but I'm really happy it's over. Like everything else in Korea, they couldn't just end it quietly. They needed a ceremony. Yes that's right, a graduation ceremony for a month long camp. Not even a month, because there were two groups of students, and each group came every other day. So we had to have a graduation ceremony for students who attended 12 days of lessons. They got diplomas, awards, gave speeches, etc. It was longer than my sister's college graduation ceremony. It was probably longer than mine as well, but I can never be sure because I skipped it in favor of eating dinner at The Feed Store in Malden, Illinois then returning home by myself and watching tv while drinking a TGI Friday's premixed cocktail straight from the bottle. True story. Those are life's treasured memories.
So anyway, part of the ceremony was a performance given by each class. The teachers were responsible for the entire performance. We had no scripts to choose from, no props, etc. My Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday class was all boys, between the ages of 10 and 13. I decided to have them do an American Idol type show, with judges, performers and a Ryan Seacrestesque host. The script was written by yours truly, and it was quite the crowd pleaser.
One of my students was a boy named Robin.  He was unique. The best way I can describe him is for you to imagine Forrest Gump trying to learn to speak Korean. He didn't click too well with the other boys in the class, so he latched on to me. Every day he brought a bag of marbles to school and would give me one or two. I now have about 20 marbles rolling around my bag. I understood about 1/3 of what he said, but that didn't stop him from talking to me nonstop about who knows what. I found a few American coins in my purse yesterday, and gave them to him. His reaction would lead one to believe he'd been given the Hope Diamond. A short while later, during performance practice in the auditorium, I looked up to see Robin crawling around the auditorium floor on his hands and knees. I asked him what he was doing. Clearly distraught, he said "Teacher, American coins is no." They'd fallen out of his pocket somewhere along the way to the restroom. Thankfully I was able to scrounge up another couple pennies from the bottom of my purse, because we had a show to do.
I let the performers in the show pick what performance they did. We had singers, dancers, and a magic show. Robin chose to dance to Gangnam Style. In my opinion, he stole the show. The parents and students liked it as well. I was happy he had his moment in the sun.
Please do enjoy.
Side note- not being a college sophomore in a sorority, the "keep calm and Gangnam Style" was not my doing. It was made by one of the Korean camp assistants, who were all college students.