Wait...I can win an online game against Koreans, what the hell is going on here?
On the work front, it looks like the shift to the new Multi-Subject English program is something serious, planned, and set to go. All last week books, materials, and promotional material arrived with growing frequency. I happened to look out the window during today and notice a large truck, and men installing a sign with the new program's name being proudly displayed in neon. This has to be a big deal now, as the Director is know to spend exactly *nothing* on advertising, and none of the stuff they are doing fits with that expectation. Looks like the whole "spending money to make money" thing is catching up with him.
Since we are nearing the end of the old "syllabus", if by syllabus you mean do whatever is in the book and trying to make it vaguely educational, we need to stretch out classes that are finishing books soon so that they aren't stuck with no work to do at the end of the month. Nothing is worse than a class without a book to guide the lesson for the day.
Taking this "stretching" attitude to it's loosest possible extreme, I took James, the only middle school kid that didn't oversleep today to the computer room. He told me he has started playing Online Worms after I beat him down on Children's Day using my game CD. Since I had tried, and failed, to sign up for Online Worms in the past, I decided that today his lesson would be translating the form from Korean to English to help me sign up. Kills two birds with one stone, and he practiced his conversational English at the same time while helping me. I was able to get the same information out of him that I got when I used "the fish", but I found out why my submission wasn't working.
According to James, and Young-Ju, the game requires your "Korean National Identification Number." As a registered alien here, I have similiar kind of number, but the submission form doesn't accept it. This isn't uncommon Samantha told me, as most Korean sites require this number to sign up. I was tempted to just string together a set of numbers and try my luck, but everyone else made it clear that was probably a bad idea. Young-Ju let me sign up with her ID number, and I promised not to get her arrested for it if such a thing was possible.
We downloaded the game as class was ending, and I found out how to start a game, and the basics before we had to go. I was excited to get playing online again, despite the language gap, as beating the computer, even handicapped, gets boring. I started up my game, got an opponent immediately, and started playing. Once I found out that the controls were actually modified from every game of Worms I've ever played, I started kicking some butt. I won upwards of six or seven matches easily, straight, with minimal effort before it dawned on me.
I've been playing Worms, or a variant, almost as long as Korean have been playing Starcraft, which is to say, over four years. I can actually win a game of Worms online, which amazes me, as the people that play on Wormnet are normally VERY good. It also dawned on me, that I will never win a game of Starcraft online against Koreans for exactly the same reason on Battlenet. They just know the game too well.