Recently in School Category

The spring semester just ended which means that it was time for my school to go all out and bus somewhere for some sightseeing and getting drunk and doing noraebang (karaoke). It was awesome. I suppose I'll have a write-up and explanation of things later but for now check out my pictures by clicking on the panorama up there or on the link down here.

I think I'm going to sacrifice chronologicality for the most part since I've been doing such a bad job of making timely updates, and try to stick with more interesting anecdotal non-time-specific posts. Hopefully it turns out well.

Today at school 2 girls came up to me and communicated to me (poorly) that they wanted me to help them with some interview thing after school. I agreed, because, why not, and I like when the students realize that I can help them with their homework assignments because I'm good at English. So, after school rolled around and at 4-ish they came to the office to get me.

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. 

1st grade (7th grade) students playing Bingo in the English cafe during lunch. Taken 12/10/2009.

The week following the airshow, I knew we had an all-school festival but I had no idea just how ridiculous it would be. I guess since Korean kids spend so much time studying that when they have a chance to have fun they go all out. The first thing I noticed when I got to school is the costumes. Each class of each grade had a class costume/uniform, in the photo above you can see 3-10 class is in pajamas, 3-9 is dressed like old women, etc.

The morning was taken up with physical activities. There was a relay race, tug-of-war, a race wearing scuba fins, jump-rope with giant ropes, and so on. Around lunchtime a whole heap of Lotteria burgers were delivered, which, by the way, are terrible, and then after lunch we moved into the gym for a talent show featuring a little talent and a lot of ridiculosity.

I suppose I should mention, before moving on, that on the Monday before GEPIK Orientation, we had a half day due to exams and a large group of teachers went out to Gapyeong where we went for a walk in the woods, and out to dinner. Pictured above is Hye-hyun, my coteacher, in the back, and her two best friends.

There's not much to be said about the hike, but if you're interested take a look at the photos on Flickr and see the most ridiculously meaty dinner I've ever seen.

For those of you who aren't on Facebook, or for anyone who'd like to see things in a clear chronological order, here's a collection of a couple months worth of Facebook status updates related to my school. Some are funny, some are slightly vulgar, and some are a bit sad/offensive. Koreans aren't known for cultural awareness.

These should give you a pretty good sense of what my days at school are like. Eventually I'll go back and add ones from before September, too, but this is it for now. Enjoy.

As mentioned in my other post, I was back to school on August 19th for an office work day before classes started the next day. However, it turned out I didn't actually have to stay all day, so I took advantage and left early, probably a mistake. Returning to school Thursday, I wasn't quite prepared for classes and I was also feeling terrible. I took Friday, the following Tuesday and then Wednesday off to recover, before I got back to school and into a rhythm.

During these days before I settled, I was sorta freaking out. We had altered schedules and now I had sole possession of 2nd grade to go along with the whole 3rd grade which I already had, bringing my total up close to 800 students. This also meant I had less free time during the day to plan, and it being a new semester I wasn't sure where to start. This peaked on the night of Sunday, August 23, and I poured out my woes to Tim, who comforted me by pointing out that being a great teacher really isn't a major requirement of my job, just having something to fill the time is, and maybe teach a couple students something. My struggles were compounded by the fact that one of my coteachers could barely communicate with me in English, so trying to prepare for her classes especially was stressing me out.

When Nouth and I were first informed that we'd be teaching summer camp, they told us it would be a four week camp. We'd two two weeks with first grade and then two weeks with second grade, and that would take our entire summer vacation. We figured that wouldn't really be fun at all, so we said we could do both first and second grade at the same time and do 2 weeks and then have 2 weeks off. After a little deliberation, they agreed to this, and they also agreed to let us leave as soon as we were done teaching, as long as we made a lesson plan for every day we left before 4:30. Since Nouth lives in Pyeongnae and it takes her about 20 minutes by bus to school, she wanted to start at 9am like regular classes during the semester, instead of the proposed 8:30. They also agreed to this, and told us we'd be teaching from 9 until 12:30, and then we'd be free to go.

After the teacher workshop trip and a lazy weekend, we were back at school on Monday to start summer camp. We started at 9 and I had the first graders for the first two periods, and then we'd switch and I'd teach second for third and fourth period. there were about 12-14 first graders and 7-9 second graders. 

Day 2 started with a meeting in the yeogwan we stayed at., where the principal gave a little speech and then said a few words about different teachers, resulting in them standing up and bowing and us all clapping, even though I had no idea what was going on, and most of the Korean teachers looked hungover or half-asleep.

After this we walked to breakfast, on the way a couple of the older male teachers found some big beetles on the ground which they picked up and kept. At breakfast we had some bottles of Korean wine on the table and a bunch of the teachers were drinking that but at that point I wasn't interested in it at all. 

In the morning I quickly packed my stuff into my new bags and headed to school, glad that classes were done for the week and we'd soon be leaving to go experience some Korean culture. Things were looking good right away: one of the younger women teachers was wearing a purple shirt with Bomberman on it, which some of you may know is a classic Super Nintendo game that me and my roommates in Madison played a lot.

Around ten AM we put away our stuff at school and headed out to the bus. Arriving at an empty row near the back, I stepped over a box full of cans and sat down, pulling out my iPod and book and prepared to pass the time on the long bus ride. About 20 minutes later, my plans were spoiled. I noticed that the box of cans which I had assumed were sodas or juice or energy drinks or something, were actually Cass beer 12oz cans, stacked 2 high in a big box, and at about 10:30 one of the male teachers had already taken one and started drinking.

Shortly after that, one of the trip leaders got up and started talking a bunch in Korean over the bus' PA system, and then they fired up the TV in the front of the bus which turned out to be connected to a karaoke machine. Now it was closer to 11, and a couple teachers came to the back and started handing out beers to everyone, and soon the "noraebus" (singing bus) was in full swing. 

Being the last week of school, my coteachers said I could do whatever I wanted in class, so I decided to teach a lesson about Michael Jackson. My lesson began with the entire 13 minute Thriller video, after which I talked about the Jackson 5 while my coteacher translated, and then I played a live performance of "I Want You Back," when Michael was still young and cute. Then I talked a couple more minutes before getting to Thriller the album, at which point they see Billie Jean was one of the most popular songs from it and they start to demand I play it, which is exactly what I had planned.

I chose the live performance of Billie Jean from the Motown 25 concert, and multiple classes cheered and/or requested I play it "one more time!" when the video finished, and I would just show them the moonwalk part a couple more times. Then I moved on to Bad, and "Man in the Mirror", featuring a great montage of him performing to giant crowds and screaming women, as well as the words subtitled on the video karaoke-style. After that video the kids are super impressed by Michael's skills and I sum up his career and then play "We are the World" to end the class. In a couple classes where we had time, the kids requested "Dangerous," and a lot of kids knew and could sing along with the parts of the song where he says "dangerous," but a couple kids actually really knew the song and were humming along with the drum rolls and such.

Today (Thursday) was also a half day because of testing week, but instead of going home at 1, we all hung out until 2 and when all the students were gone the teachers gathered in the new gym to compete in a grueling multi-athlon of events like tossing hula hoops onto big orange cones as pictured above.

The teachers were divided into three teams: first grade, second grade, and third grade (my team). We started off with a little bit of group stretching and then prepared for the first event, tug-of-rope. This tug-of-rope involved three ropes laying on the center of the basketball court, and each time lined up behind the baselines, and when the whistle was blown you had to run out and grab the rope and pull 2 of the 3 to your side. To make it tricky, men could only touch the rope once a woman had. Our team actually lost this event to the first grade teachers, just barely. We got a little confused about our strategy on the final round and too many people ended up on one rope and they were able to take the other two easily. 

As I mentioned before, on Monday Hye-Hyun came to my apartment with the school engineer to install the new curtain/shade she ordered for me online. At the same time, the building manager came with us to look at my gas boiler and see what my issue was. She informed me that unplugging it and plugging it back in was the correct solution, I just shouldn't hit any buttons after doing that. I guess the thing is silent when it's on just the water setting, and I had been waiting to hear the noise of it starting and thought it wasn't working. That was just about all I did on Monday.

I did actually start teaching in my third grade classes this week, which was pleasantly surprising in a way because I was expecting them to be much more out of control than they were. One thing I noticed was some of the girls who were so loud outside of school were dead silent in class. This week I also experienced the zombie class, 210, where the excitement from the first week must have worn off because I didn't remember them being so silent before, but this time it was like teaching in a tomb. 

Monday morning I was able to regain hot water by unplugging and replugging the gas boiler, although the functioning has not returned to normal it gives me hot water so that's good.

Not really my first week of teaching considering I only did introduction/icebreaker stuff in my third grade classes, but I did teach for the first time this week. On Monday I had two third grade classes, and I had prepared a little bit of a lesson but before class the teacher I'd be with came up and told me that we could just do intro stuff and have the kids ask me questions about the mysterious nation I'm from.

The classes went fine, although my schedule was changed unexpectedly I still only had two classes. The kids all screamed and cheered when I walked in the room, and then when I said hi they screamed and cheered again (this behavior would be repeated by every single class). In all third grade classes throughout the week I did the same thing, and they all asked pretty much the same questions, from the I Love English handbook. "Where are you from?" "What is your hobby?" "What food do you like" "How long are you going to stay in Korea?" Etc... Some questions weren't always formed so well: "How tall are you?" usually came as "what centimeter?" or "centimeter what?" and "Do you have a girlfriend?" often was just "girlfriend?" Another one was "foot size?" By just reading out questions from the handbook I got asked some interesting ones as well, such as "what is the weather like today?" "why don't you have lunch with me today?" "what are you doing this afternoon?" "are you busy tonight?" and more.