Springtime in Korea

So, since I haven't written anything in a long time I guess this post will be a summary of January, February, March and April. I did Winter English Camp for the first couple weeks in January, it was good and since I had the experience from Summer Camp last year I was able to do it much better this time. I had a class of 6th graders from local elementary schools, only about 2 kids came every day so we were able to do a lot of fun stuff and it was a good time. I also had a class of 1st graders from my school and they were cool but a little bit more rowdy. Overall the camp experience this time around was much better the students were all happy with no complaints, probably because I played a lot of games with them. I had planned a 2-week course of lessons with comprehension tests every now and then but based on the students' reactions to the first week, which was not bad but they just didn't quite have the attention span, I trashed the 2nd week and replaced it with Jeopardy games and other fun stuff.

After Winter Camp came a few weeks of vacation during which time I did almost nothing, just hanging out with Hilary when she was here, and being lonely when she went to Japan and America. Thus January and February passed being pretty uneventful with no school and no travelling for me or anything exciting to speak of, except the Hwaseong fortress in February, but that already got it's own post. I did read a bunch of books in February thanks to the epic amount of free time I had and days where I had to go to school but there was no class (about 2 weeks worth I think). It was good times. Also at some point around there I met some new teachers from Simseok Elementary School and I was in touch with another person named Samuel via e-mail, who'd just moved to Maseok.

Finally in March school started again, although we did have like 2 days of school in February when the 3rd graders graduated, but the new school-year actually started in March. Gang So-won, my coteacher who just had a baby, came back briefly from her 3 months of maternity leave but then left again for a 6-month hiatus, so the substitute who took her spot is here to stay for at least that much time, and now she's earned the respect of the students so things are better in her classes. Also, on the first day of school, we were supposed to get another new English teacher but she got in a car accident and her mother was seriously injured, so she decided just to quit and take care of her, which meant we were without the extra teacher for a while. This was important because the 2nd grade classes were set to be leveled into high, intermediate, and low level classes but without her we couldn't do it, so the school had to hunt frantically for a replacement. We got a man, the only male English teacher at the school now, and he is not bad, but there's always hiccups when you throw a new person into a system. He also speaks Spanish which is interesting, he told me he went to a foreign language high school and studied Spanish, but that was a long time ago.

Once again, I was scheduled to teach 3rd grade and half of 2nd grade, and Nouth would teach the rest of 2nd and all of 1st. One problem was that Nouth's contract ended at the end of March and she hadn't told the school whether she was staying or going.

Finally, towards the end of March, Nouth told our school that she had decided to go back to the US. I think this kinda freaked them out. They must've thought she would definitely stay because they hadn't really been bugging her about it, and then when she told them her decision she said some people started to act differently toward her, being passive aggressive about things, and they tried really hard to convince her to stay. Partially, they also knew that since it was so late in the process it would take a while to get a replacement and we'd be left without a 2nd teacher for a while. She told the school that the reason she was leaving was her husband really wanted to go, but in truth she had also made up her mind she wanted to move on to bigger and better things. Well, the school tried hard to satisfy her husband, finding him a job at a different school (he didn't like his) but it didn't matter since that wasn't *really* the problem. So finally, after that little bit of drama, Nouth left.

Also during February/March, I had a slight mold problem on the wall in my bedroom, and by slight I mean massively huge.

Even though I cleaned the mold off the wall, I still was a little worried about the health risks so for a while I slept on the floor in my living room, which actually was not so bad. Eventually the landlord sent in a mold specialist who looked at the mold and then left, and then the landlord sent in somebody to wallpaper over it, and that's where I stand now, which a wallpapered-over patch of mold on my wall.

I mentioned before that I met some new teachers from Simseok Elementary, and I also met Samuel and Taewoo, a really cool couple who have become sort of like uncles to us. Taewoo is Korean and Samuel has been in Korea for 5 years, so they are very knowledgeable and willing to help us with stuff. Taewoo especially, since he is currently doing a TEFL Master's program online and therefore stays at home a lot. Also, he has made a semi-part-time hobby of helping foreigners do stuff like plan trips and buy tickets and that sort of stuff, he's almost like a travel agent. Samuel found me via this blog and then emailed me, and we finally met up for dinner, but it was just me and them and they didn't meet Hilary until the event pictured above. As soon as I met them though, I knew she would love them.

The Simseok Elementary teachers I saw on the street one day, and I figured rather than be epically awkward about the group of 4 foreigners standing on my corner I ought to say hi. I gave my information to one of them, Katrina, but I didn't see her again until after the dinner pictured above. This dinner was planned as a means for the old Maseokers to meet the new ones, but since I was only in touch with Katrina and she was sick the only Simseok teacher who came was Justin, the bald guy on the right, and his Korean coworker. Samuel and Taewoo also came but aside from them nobody else was new. We finally met Katrina again at Samuel and TW's apartment when they had us over for dinner, which we were happy about because we'd Facebook stalked Katrina and decided that she was pretty cool. Since then we've hung out with all of them a lot more and it's been good times.

So now we're up to April. I apologize for the somewhat disjointed and non-chronological narrative style of this post but that's just the way it is. My school offered to me the opportunity to teach a debate club once a month on Saturday for 3 hours, for a rate of 25,000W an hour (like 20USD). I of course accepted because it's money and it's 1 time every month, but then I was hit with some bad news. Most of the kids in the class aren't very good at English. Sooo, we don't really have to do "debate" per se because most of the kids can't. Honestly, I'm not sure they even could debate in Korean the way they are trained in these schools. When I showed my students a clip from "Freaks and Geeks" and asked what they saw that was different from Korean schools, one student said "students opinions," meaning the teacher asked the student their opinion about something. In the clip from the show, Kim Kelly is asked to discuss "On the Road" by Kerouac and explain what she thinks the theme is. I guess in Korea they only do lectures and students don't really talk at all.

Anyways, it's sort of a problem when you want to have a debate club. Luckily, one of the students (the one I'm talking to in the above photo) has lived in Kent, Washington, and speaks really good English so at least 1 person in the class is capable of debate. Sadly, he was absent from class the 2nd time around, but he said he'll be there next time.

On April 17th, with Paula and Stuart and some other folks we went to the Flower Festival in Yeouido, Seoul. It was basically a street lined with cherry blossoms and filled with a billion people. It was sort of cool I guess, despite the huge crowd, there were art pieces along the sidewalks and various street performers here and there. Some of the art pieces were a little lame, like 2 that featured just pictures of Kim Yuna, the Korean figure skater. We walked the street but there were less flowers than I'd expected, but we got to see the Korean National Assembly which is a pretty cool building. Afterward we went into Itaewon to La Tavola for some amazing Italian food.

I think I'll end this post here, with the arrival of Clare, the new teacher at my school. She's from the UK originally but most recently she lived for about 10 years in Canada. She's got ESL teaching experience and she's very outgoing/outspoken so the students should like her. She was supposed to get here on a Monday but she got delayed leaving England because of the volcanic ash, so she got here on Friday the 23rd, and Hilary and I met up with her at school with Anna, our coteacher, and we went out to a kimbap joint for dinner. Clare's lucky because not many people get the kind of reception that we gave her. Usually you hear from teachers in Korea they spent their first week/month alone with no friends and not knowing anybody.

So after about a month without a second native teacher, we're back to full strength.

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