First Month, Second Year: Here We Go Again

---

I’ve been back in Korea for a month and I have been informed that it’s time for a blog update. So here it goes:



The flight back went really smoothly. Absolutely no issues getting back to the country and back to my apartment. Despite being in America for what seemed like forever (2 months), my town seems almost exactly the same (there’s a new hair salon that caters to foreigners, though I’ll never use it due to my loyalty to Helena. She cuts my bangs for free and gives me fries sometimes. Can’t beat that service. Also, my favorite chicken galbi place was pulled out. Luckily there’s another location of the same chain in town. It’s just much farther away, unfortunately.) I enjoy most of my classes. I have to teach kindergarten now. It’s only twice a week, but it’s just as dreadful as I imagined it would be. I teach the really violent class of boys, so I’ve had maybe one good day of kindergarten in my first month. They’re also really spoiled kids. I’m a super-mean teacher if I check HW with an orange crayon instead of a red crayon as they demand. So that’s fun… I don’t currently teach the kids that used to be my favorite class, and the class itself has been broken up a bit (a couple left our school, a couple are in a different class due to time-slot) but I currently have a break during the day at the exact time that the foreign teacher teaches the remainder of the class, so I think I’m poised to take that over when he leaves in July. I started teaching the more advanced of the two oldest SR classes (kids who were in kindergarten), which made me feel like a bit of a traitor at first, but they’re an AMAZING group of kids and I still get to do make-up lessons with my favorite student, Lisa, on Tuesdays, so that works out pretty well. They slowest kid in the class is most definitely autistic on a Rain Man-scale, which I find fascinating. He’ll interrupt me in class to show me some number chain or analyze my fingerprints. And I never scold him for it because I’m too interested in how his brain works.



For activities I teach one science class with an old class from last year. The partner class with my class. But they’re much better behaved. The only real problem child is Anna, and she and I are special friends, so everything goes pretty well usually. I also teach science to a new class of 7-year-olds that already had a bit of English when they came to us. I love them. They’re a lot of fun and usually pretty well behaved. Jayden is a bit of a crier. But if you tell him to stop crying, that usually fixes the problem. Which sort of blows my mind. On Mondays I teach Orda (logic, essentially) to a new class of 6-year-olds that supposedly had some English when they came to us. They’re a mixed-bag when it comes to English abilities (Daniel had a whole year at another SLP, Steven recently caught on to the word “teacher”) but they’re really well-behaved. I enjoy teaching Orda to 6-year-olds as opposed to 7-year-olds. With 7-year-olds you basically just say “We have to get through these 3 pages today.” And they can pretty much do the work themselves. Then you can just give them 3 different Orda games from our collection and they already know the rules so they just do that all themselves. With 6-year-old Orda, I have to prepare all of the pages ahead of time to make sure that we don’t spend all of class punching things out or making dice for our games. Then we do each individual page together. And then I get 3 of the same game and we learn how to play it together. It’s a lot less tedious.



Last week I went on my first field trip with the kindergarteners. We went to a clearing where the local fire department had set up their educational trailer. So the kids get to put on helmets and learn a bit about fire safety in one part of the trailer, and then, in groups, they’re put into a fire situation and they have to escape and climb a ladder so they can slide down the fire escape. It didn’t take that much time, so the other half was going to a playground/soccer field and playing for an hour or so. I played soccer with many of the boys from the other 7-year-old class and a few from the 6-year-old class. Only one of the boys from my class was interested in playing soccer instead of climbing on the playground.



I haven’t had a lot of money since I left some in my account, but not really enough to get by for 5 weeks. So I spend a lot of my time reading, cleaning, and at the gym. I’ve decided to start training for a 7K race in Seoul in June. My training plan is for a half-marathon, though. Basically because I’m too lazy to find a 7K training plan. So I have to run 5 miles this weekend. That’ll be a challenge.



We did celebrate my birthday by going to a barbecue ribs restaurant in town. Everytime I go there, we’re the only people in the restaurant. And we don’t visit that frequently, so I have no idea how they’re still in business. But I’m thankful they still are. Afterwards we got cheesecake at Coffee Bean. That Saturday we celebrated St. Patricks Day. Luckily, I was here last year, so I knew what we DIDN’T want to do. We skipped the outdoor party from last year, and just went into the international district (Itaewon). Mary, Victoria, and I went to Suji’s (New York-style deli) for lunch, and then went book shopping at the two English bookstores in Itaewon with my birthday money from work. After that, we met up with many of our friends at Wolfhounds, an Irish pub. People came and went for the rest of day. We had a good time, and randomly met some people who also live in Seoul.



I recently bought my tickets for my summer vacation, which will predominantly be in Indonesia, both the Yogyakarta-area and Bali. I’m pretty excited about it. We also found out that we have five days for Chuseok! So at least Brittney and I are going to Hong Kong/Macau. AND this summer there will be an international expo on the southern coast that looks REALLY cool. So that’s in the works as well.

---

Comments

[AlliM]

By The Way
I found this video of a road trip in South Korea and it was perfect because it shows Daejeon, Busan, Seoraksan, and Seoul. I've been all of those places. It's really beautiful and I think it does a great job showing how pretty Korea is. http://vimeo.com/18114813