Katelyn and Gregory Haskins find their way through—and around—the world
A quick update about our lack of updates. I now have installed the parts needed to fix my laptop, and I expect a full recovery. It’ll take a couple more days to download all our backups, but we should be able to resume semi-regular updates soon-ish. Oh, and lots of pictures, I promise. We went to Seoul a few times last weekend, and we’re planning a trip to Suwon this weekend, so there will be much to show and tell. Anyway, on to…
We’re sorry for the sudden dearth of updates, but I have figured out the computer issue (a bad hard disk I installed earlier this year; that’s what I get for buying Western Digital!!) and we should be back in business soon. In the true spirit of MacGyver (get it?) I’ve managed to jerry-rig something so that the machine gets a few more heartbeats while we wait for the replacement parts to traverse the Pacific. Cross your fingers, people.
So we had our first full day at KoC today, and I got a real taste of what having my own classroom will be like. It’s been a little frustrating trying to get adjusted and start planning lessons. Nothing is really laid out simply for us and we’ve had to do a lot of digging to figure out where the last teacher left off. For example, we have been given a packet of information with a monthly lesson plan guideline ( a map of what should be completed each month, compiled by the teacher’s assistants) as well as this week’s lesson plan (completed by the teachers), but when I sat down today and compared the two, I discovered that my kids seem to be at least a month ( probably more) behind.
Today was the first time we went to work at Kids On Campus, which looks like it’s a great situation. The school is modern, clean, and very nice looking, and the kids are beyond cute. We’ll each be getting our own class of kindergartners (and our own classroom) starting next Monday, so we’ll have this week to learn names and get up to speed on our teaching responsibilities. The kindergartners will come every day to the same class all year round, while the older students rotate between teachers each afternoon, so we’ll only see them a couple times a week. The teachers and administrators we’ve met have all been great and very willing to help, which is good because we’re going to need it.
In case you haven’t heard, Katie and I have officially accepted positions to teach English in South Korea for the next year. We sent all our documentation over yesterday, so we’re now in the process of getting our work visas approved. We will start work at the end of August, so that leaves us with just over a month to pack up our lives and ship out (which means we’ll probably be around to watch Bob Costas gush over Michael Phelps’ olympic dreams, but not for the first game of the Michigan football season, sadly).
