Sugar Sugar Rune

I split my class up into two teams of four to encourage some friendly competition between them. On asking them their team names, I was presented with 'Drago' - "No Mary Teacher, not Dragon, Drago!" - and the other with something along the lines of 'shoogashoogaroo'. Their spelling of basic words is little to be desired and thus attempting to get them to tell me how to write this bizarre word on the board accurately was far from realistic. Needless to say, I made them choose another name, though whether they really wanted 'Felix' or 'Phoenix', I'm not sure.

The 'friendly' competition was great: they cheered on their teammates as each competitor was called up , and they sighed at them when they ineptly allowed the other team to gain points. This was as planned, but just until I got scowls from the losing team as the winners were rewarded with the sought after sticker prizes. The sense of hatred filling the room was so strong I felt obliged to win the other half of the class over later by pretending their artwork was so amazing it deserved a reward. But then when I suggested some art was better than others I was faced with whinging from the original winners (some of them just painted their whole sheet of paper black; hardly the beautiful underwater scene I'd asked for) which to save my ears I felt it easier to just give out stickers to everyone. This in turn was met with puzzled sounds of "Why Elika sticker?" To which I replied, "To keep her from whining and giving me a headache". I know they don't always understand what I say, but this is really for my own amusement. I think they get the gist from my tone of voice and look of disdain. But oh, the politics of small children...

To get back to the topic at hand, I had ten minutes remaining of the lesson after my art class, in which I allowed them to fill with their own games. The boys got out their toy monster trucks and proceeded to battle them across the table, while the girls got out pink filofax organisers and started to plaster stickers over them, write lists of names, or other such meaningless activities. Keen to show me, it was at this point that I learnt the true meaning of 'shoogashoogaroo': "Sugar Sugar Rune" as it is to be spelled and pronounced, turned out to be the trademark of these organisers. They had timetables for the day, the week and the month, along with pictures of girls in their underwear with peelable stickers for dressing them up. As far as they are encouraging the young ladies of this country to become organised OCD patients, more importantly they are ingraining a fashion conscience in early.

Well, at least now I knew how to spell it, I was sure they could use this crazy phrase as their team name next lesson.

This evening Lauren and I wandered into our local stationery store, and what did I find? Nothing other than several Sugar Sugar Rune filofaxes, along with separate sticker inserts that you can buy to replenish/add to your dress-up images. Of course I had to buy one - at 4000 won I felt this was a small price to pay to fit in with my new playmates. I now have my own Sugar Sugar Rune filofax to put all my daily activities into, but best of all I can play dress up in sticker form, creating my best outfit and my street outfit and my love outfit, all complete with shoes, bags and accessories.

By scouring the internet I quickly learned that Sugar Sugar Rune is a Japanese animé comic/TV series starring two witches who have to conceal their identities (and so obviously dress in as fashionable human clothes as possible) in order to compete in a contest to become Queen of the Magical World (see here for more info). This sounds just too exciting, so no doubt I'll also be searching for the DVD at some point during my next shopping trip, though if anyone wants to bother to search for a download let me know *^^*

NB. The term 'Mary Teacher' comes from the fact that everybody at school has an English name - kids and teachers alike - so for a so-called English teacher to waltz in with a Korean name is unheard of and frowned upon by parents. It is thus that I've had to get used to this new name, but with the 'Teacher' appendage it doesn't seem so strange. "Not so strange?" you ask? But I ignore you and suggest that school politics is a topic for another day.

And if any of you girls are feeling jealous at my super cool filofax, here's a fun website to fulfil all your fashion needs ^^