Blogs from Taejon, South Korea, Asia - page 7

This will be an ongoing entry throughout the year - just funny quotes from the Korean children "Teacher, you look like mosquito." - not referring to me, lol "Teacher, you are very attractive. Can I please do question #5?" "I want to go to Harvard." - included not for its humor, but for the fact that this illustrates the schooling culture here. This boy, name Mihn-Jay is a top student who probably will end up at Harvard. He's 11 yrs. old. Talking about tariffs on exports and trading with the US. Sammy "America is bad" Ji-Hoon jumps out of seat "NOOOO, U.S. is smart. They know how to uuuse the money!!" "Teacher, you talk too fast! I no understand." "I hate Japan. I hate Japanese. Japanese steal from Korea." "Chinese put trash in their dumplings. They ... read more

Today was the first day of my job training at Avalon school (called a hakwon in Korea). Peter, the same Korean man who picked me up from the bus station and took me to my apt. when I first arrived, came to my stoop around 2:00 PM to walk me to the school. It was very hot and humid out as we began our walk. I seriously don’t know how people dress the way they do here during the daytime, but 15 minutes later we arrived at the school. My training consisted of an initial meeting with the school director’s brother, pronunciation Il-Huan (he speaks English, director does not), where we went over some paperwork and talked about my employment contract. Apparently, my higher salary was based on the fact that I took courses at Wharton ... read more

Well, we said goodbye to the campers today, a few of the ELTs, and also a bunch of the CCs. The Farewell Performance went well (Thank God!) and then I spent 45 minutes talking with the parents. Actually, Cherry, my Korean counterpart, did most of the talking seeing as many of them didn't speak English. The kids did a few dialogues to show off their improved (yeah, right!) English skills, and showed their parents the workbooks that we worked in. A very long 45 minutes for me! Lunch was quite good. They had a huge buffet for everyone and lots of things to try. I had Korean cookies (who knew there was such a thing?) as well as a bunch of things that I couldn't name. After lunch we were going to head to the bank ... read more

So we got paid today. Erika and I went to the bank at lunch today with two other ELTs, Andrew and Evan. We wanted to be sure that we could get our money out and it's a good thing that we did, because she and I had problems. Andrew and Evan didn't have any issues because it was their first year teaching here and they were issued new bank accounts and new bank cards. The reason we had problems was that since we had already had a bank account from last year, they would not issue us new bank cards. We got new accounts, but no card. The assumption (because there are so many misunderstandings and difficulty transmitting information) was that our old bank card would be linked to the new account. Well, it wasn't. I ... read more

Today started off like a regular teaching day. Worked out of the workbook, played a game, more work out of the workbook, played another game, then worked on our research projects until lunchtime. Boring, but following the routine. It was good to get some time to work on our research project, since they have to present it to the school tomorrow, and then to their parents on Friday morning. I wrote out the sentences that they will say, and they drew a picture to go along with their sentence. Pretty simple stuff. After lunch we ran a carnival. Each of the ELTs were in charge of one station, and the CCs took the kids from station to station. I was running a beachball toss with another ELT, Laura. We had a competition to throw the beach ... read more