Skyping with my students

It's hard to describe how I feel right now. I just had a 20-minute conversation via Skype with my future Korean students. They are all 13 years old. I was surprised to see how well they could speak English. I felt like I should talk really slowly so that they could understand, but the teacher there, Kat, was talking to them really quickly and even with some slang so that was quite the surprise to me. She said something along the line of "Who wants to ask her a question?" but when you say it in real life it comes out more like "Who wantsta asker a question?" and that is normal to a native English speaker but can be confusing if you don't know the language very well. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they could understand her! This will make my teaching much more fun and easier too.

They asked me questions like:

• What is your favorite hobby? (They must not have been either listening to each other or listening to me because they asked this one twice)
• What is your favorite food?
• Do you have any brothers or sisters?
• Do you have any friends in Korea?

After some prompting by the teacher we talked about the time here (it was 6:19pm when I answered so I explained that it was dinner time so they could understand the context and that it was only Tuesday).

I'm so glad that I got to Skype with them (they could see me but I could not see them, so that was a bummer but oh well). I'm really grateful that Kat was willing and wanting to do this with us. She told me in an email that she uses Skype with the students to talk to her sister. That's pretty cool too. I would love to find a class in the world to Skype with my students. How cool would that be? I was going to say "the US" but then I remembered that no classes are in session then due the the time zone. London would not work because they are 9 hours difference. But something like Sydney, Australia would work since they are very close in time zones. How amazing would that be!? I'm going to try to search for schools to be Skypemates with!

The silliest thing is that I worried I smiled too much. I have heard a lot that you have to be very strict and stern with the kids there. Did I seem too friendly and therefore set myself up to have students not respect me? It's hard to not smile when you are staring at yourself on Skype and you don't get to see who you are talking to. Plus, I just smile a lot. I'm going to hope that this could only be a good thing.

Anyway, SO glad that I got to do that. Wow, what an amazing opportunity!