If You Give a Kid a Dum Dum

I've officially finished my second week of teaching and am about to go into my third. It's been an incredible experience so far.

This week, as a part of my lesson on the present continuous tense (I'd be lying if I said I didn't need a quick Google refresh on what exactly that was), I had my students play Pictionary. One of their team members would draw an action that I told them on the board and their team members had to guess using complete sentences. The prize? Good ole' Dum Dums from the U. S. of A.

It's interesting how much students' attitudes change when candy is on the line. They go from not very interested to bugging the ref (me) for every little thing and begging for more tiebreakers. We had to move on and do a workbook page, so the winning team was decided by Rock, Paper, Scissors.

After I gave the students Dum Dums, they all surrounded me. They kept asking where I got them and if I had more (I didn't).  If you have multiple pets, you know that when you open a bag of treats they all surround you and beg for them. Well, that's exactly how I felt in that moment. Except I had a huddle of 15 12-year-olds around me.

**Basically how the students looked at me after they tried their candy. Including the one laying on it's back and the other one in the back going bazerk.

Moving on to Saturday, I originally was going to go to Bangkok for a pool party. However, I ended up in the ER on Tuesday (stay tuned for the blog post all about that little situation) so I decided to stay in Chonburi for the weekend and take it easy.

My friend, Deanna, and I decided to go to Khao Sam Muk, otherwise known as Monkey Mountain. This is a hill that you can either walk or drive up. Even as you enter the premises of the mountain, wild monkeys are everywhere. When you get to the top, there are stands selling bananas and corn on the cob for you to feed the monkeys. Of course Deanna and I spend way too much money on bananas to feed them.

Surprisingly, the monkeys were very polite. If you held a banana out, they would come up and sit at your feet, looking up at you with their big brown eyes. When you held it out, they would grab it from your hand, run a few feet away, and eat it.

**Deanna feeding a mama monkey and her baby. My heart may have stopped every time I saw a baby.

The monkeys were such a unique sight to see.

And come to think of it, there were a lot of similarities between giving the monkeys bananas and my students candy...except the monkeys leave you alone after you give them their food.

(All jokes, my students are awesome.)