One week down

So, we’ve officially been in Korea for over a week now and are starting to get settled in some ways, and are far from settled in others. After spending most of the weekend unpacking, shopping, cleaning, and organizing, our apartment is definitely feeling much more like a home. All we need now are chairs (seriously, we have none of any kind), air conditioning, and real utilities (like internet). There’s a new teacher at KoC who started just today without any training whatsoever, so we’re glad we’ve got that week under our belt before jumping off the deep end at school.

Our first day as real teachers went pretty well, I think. Katie did pretty well keeping her rowdy bunch in control, but I was probably a little too soft on my kindie kids. I guess I’ll have to be more of a tough guy tomorrow. Teaching the primary-age students is a whole different ballgame; they’re much more mature, although not necessarily better English speakers. One of my classes today had two students, neither of whom had spoken a word of English before (aside from “yes”). The begining of that lesson sounded at lot like this:

So, yeah, that was interesting. By the end of the session I had them making a pretty mean “B” sound and repeating back useful vocab (“ball”, “beach”, “balloon”, etc).

My other primary class today has more advanced students, to the point where they’re developing their writing style. It was my task to teach them what a good introduction is, which isn’t easy when you think about it. My job wasn’t made any easier when the book provided specific examples that they kept wanting to copy verbatim. Oh well. It should be interesting to read those first essays next week, to say the least.

Today it rained for the first time since we’ve been here, so we can now confirm that precipitation does in fact exist on this side of the Pacific. As is expected on rainly days, umbrella sales brought in big revenues today, including a cool ?10,000 from my wallet. With the extra indoor time, I have finally started studying Korean from the internet and a couple books loaned to us from a co-worker. Perhaps now I can expand my vocabulary beyond “thank you”. I think I’ve got the basic knack for reading Hangul, but I’m sure I’ll have forgotten a bunch by morning.

Comments

Hi Greg,
Just a quick comment on your first full “real” day of teaching:  “Yes” is much better than “No.”

I forgot to mention that I named a child as well. Each kid takes an English name (e.g. Brian, Emma, etc.) for KoC, and the new girl didn’t yet have one.  This was also complicated by the fact that she spoke no English (of course). Basically, I started going through a list of my friends’ and family’s names until she muttered “Angela” as if she had already put some thought into it.

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