Five Things

[+] Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! Christmas isn't really an important secular holiday here. It's a red day, meaning I would have the day off it wasn't already on a Saturday. Christian Koreans treat it as a purely religious holiday and everyone treats it as a couple's holiday, almost akin to Valentine's Day. A few of the bigger department stores lights up and there is a massive coca-Cola sponsored Christmas display along the streets of Gangnam, but there are no Christmas decorations in my neighborhood, I'm still teaching class (winter break don't start until next Tuesday) and I've almost forgotten it's almost Christmas. However, I was linked to a cover of the Little Drummer Boy yesterday and I've been listening to it non-stop. It's really excellent and a nice bit of Christmas cheer.


[+] Well, when I say I'm "teaching classes," I mean I finished the textbook last week, so this week I'm showing Up dubbed in Korean with English subtitles. My co-teacher and I take turns sitting in the back of the classroom and occasionally saying, "Quiet" while the other stays in the office and works. Of course, this means I've watched the first twenty minutes of Up twenty times now and if anyone needs me, I'll be weeping in a corner because all happiness will grow old and die or get crotchety and deaf and we all end up alone and sad and *sob*. (Class is only forty minutes long, so I only see the depressing beginning, not the uplifting and happy ending. The students don't seem nearly as affected as I am.)

[+] I've finished my lesson plans for English camp. Well, I've mostly finished them. The last day is a movie day and I really should come up with actual content to teach, but I don't want to. I still need to finish prepping for camp, but this is by far the most prepared I've ever been. I'm sure this will blow up in my face somehow.

[+] I bought my ticket home yesterday. I leave Korea on February 28th, just over two months from now. I was adding money to my T-money card (subway/bus pass) yesterday night and I had to pause and think if would actually use $50 on transportation in the next two months. I got a bit teary about how I was leeeeeeeeeaving, although it might have been because I'm going to have to start buying gas again and there's no way $50 worth of gas could ever possible last two months.

[+] I had a completely gratifying moment on the subway home yesterday when someone asked me what I was reading and I was able to answer with "a survey of political and social forces during the late Roman Empire." I mean, I was reading about the political and social forces that lead to the fall of the Roman Empire (Justinian's Flea, good if a bit pedantic), and I'm not actually ashamed of anything I read (okay, maybe that needle-point based mystery), but it's nice to asked that question when I'm actually reading something impressive.

It never rains, but it pours

I'm busy, which is unusual. I work forty hours a week, but only fourteen of those hours are actually spent teaching, and class prep, grading, extra classes and miscellaneous child wrangling are not enough to fill the other twenty six hours. I normally have an hour or two of free time in the afternoons, which is why going from having nothing to do to more than I can possible do practically overnight has left me reeling.

The semester ends on December 27th and two weeks of English camp starts the next day, which means I have six days finishing planning and preparing 28 hour-and-a-half long lessons from scratch. I probably should have started planning before last week, but I had a training conference the week before last and I wanted to wait until afterward to start planning. I don't have a text book for English camp, so I've chosen stories to base the lessons on. The 3rd and 4th graders are reading Eric Carle books. The 5th and 6th graders are reading fairy tales, which I'm going to write myself because I can't find decent easy reader versions using the vocabulary I want to target.

This is my forth time teaching English camp and each time, I oscillate from being unprepared to being too prepared. My first English camp was a disaster of epic proportion, mostly because my co-teacher and I didn't plan at all (and then my co-teacher just stopped showing up, leaving me to deal with the mess), so when it came time to prepare for the second English camp, I spent a month freaking out and working late and creating hours of extra material. It worked - the camps were a success - but I barely escaped with my sanity intact. This summer I had only planned the first week of the camp, which blew up in my face when the it turned out that, due to a schedule mix-up, what I thought was the first week was, in fact, not the first week, and I spent the next two weeks frantically playing catch up. I'm hoping that by my fourth try I will have found a happy medium.

To further busy things, the broadcasting club has started practicing again last week after a month and a half hiatus. I love those kids to death and I'm so proud of the work they're doing. This time, we're making them write their own articles about their week at Seongnam English Town, and only Ji-won and Ji-yeon turned in articles written entirely in English. The other girls' articles were a mix of Korean and English. One went 한국말, 한국말, 한국말, extreme weather systems, 한국말, 한국말, puppetry 한국말, 한국말, water festival, leaving me very curious about what she was talking about. Last week, each student came by during their lunch for one-on-one help editing their essays. I helped Ji-won and Ji-yeon fix the mistakes in their essays and my co-teacher Nicole helped Hye-ryeong and Han-som translate their articles. Then, on Friday, Jeong-yun (whose article was only 60% in Korean) and her friend Ye-sol (who isn't even in the Broadcasting Club, but is super smart) showed up before Nicole finished lunch and the three of us, with minimal assistance from Jeong-yun's cell phone dictionary, wrote an entire page . I'm ridiculously proud of how well she did and how she kept trying at something she thought was impossible. So yes, I love the Broadcasting Club and I'm glad they have one more report this year, but it does take up a lot of time.

영어 캠프 - Week Two

(I promise this is the last post about English camp until I start to plan for the winter camps in December.)


6th graders posing on the last day of camp.
During week two, the 3rd & 4th graders studied body parts and animals. Both units were covered in the regular lessons, but review is always good, and I used the opportunity to teach extra vocabulary and grammar. During the body parts unit, I put the students into pairs and had one student trace their partner's body on a sheet of butcher paper. Once they were done, they drew in additional features (such as the face) and labeled the body parts. Their favorite part about the activity was how they didn't have to sit at their desks. My favorite part was how few students actually sat on the ground when tracing their friends; half of them chose to Asian squat and do a funny squatting waddle as they made their way around their partner's body.


During the animal unit we read Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?. Well, I read Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See? and the students listened to me and looked at the pictures. The first time, they just listened to the story. The second time, they made their own copy of the book. I gave the kids pictures of the different animals (bear, bird, duck, cat, etc.) and as we read the story, they colored the pictures the appropriate colors and wrote descriptions of the animals (brown bear, red bird, yellow duck, purple cat, etc.) Or at least they tried too. One boy had some trouble.


Whoops.
On Wednesday afternoon, 안 수빈 and 신 다해, two 4th graders who aren't in English camp, saw me in the hallway and followed me back to my classroom to play. We colored the animal flashcards from camp and they entertained themselves for a while by writing things like cat and ice cream and I love you Teacher on the whiteboard. Then they gave themselves eye tests. 다해 wrote an eye chart on the board and 수빈 sat on a desk a couple of rows back, covered one eye with a fuzzy plush ball and called out the letters. Apparently this was fun, although they did get into an argument when 다해 told 수빈 her eyesight wasn't very good. The eye chart reminded me of the eye test I had during a medical exam my first year in Korea. I had only been in the country for a few days, the only Korean I knew was hello, kimchi and I love you very much, and all the eye charts at the hospital were entirely in Korean letters. Eventually, the nurse found an eye chart used for very young children that had pictures instead of letters, and I had to identify the pictures in English while my co-teacher translated my answers into Korean.


They also wrote out the Korean alphabet and, with some help, transliterated it into the Latin alphabet.
My mom and sister arrived in Korea on Thursday and I brought them to school with me on Friday. They made quite an impression on my students. Fourth Grade, Chapter 7 is titled Who Is She? and it was a gratifying moment when every single one of my 4th graders looked at my family and asked, "Teacher, who are they?" Yes, retention! My students were also the only people we met during Mom and Leah's trip who accepted that my sister, who was adopted from Korea as an infant, was American without question. I guess I'm so firmly linked with America in their minds that despite looking like a Korea person, my sister must be American. While they didn't question her nationality, they did seem a bit fuzzy on her age. My 5th & 6th grade class objected to me calling Leah my 여동생 (Korean for younger sister, as opposed to 언니, older sister), so I asked them how old they thought Leah was. "Is she 30?" one girl asked. For the record, my sister is fifteen. I'm twenty-five. While I'm routinely mistaken as my 21-year-old brother's younger sister, this is the first time someone has ever asked if I'm younger than Leah.


Leah is on the left. Does that child look 30?!?
At the beginning of camp, I divided the 3rd and 4th grade classes into three teams and told the students that group with the most points at the end of camp would get a special prize from America. Teams could get points for winning a game, volunteering to speak in class or having the first person to finish an activity. On the last day of camp, I brought in Silly Bandz my mother had brought me from the US and gave them to the winning teams. Despite the fact that I guarantee you that none of my students have ever seen a Silly Bandz in their life, they loved them. I gave the older students Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (also from America) and my kids, who have only ever had Korean candy, were throughly impressed. "Teacher," they told me, "VERY GOOD CANDY!" I know kids, I know.

All the photos from English Camp are here. I'm so glad it's over!

영어 캠프 - Week One

English camp has improved after the snafu of the first day, thankfully, but it's still been hectic. Since I thought I was only teaching the 3rd & 4th graders last week, I had only planned for the 3rd & 4th grade camps and was going to use my afternoons to plan for the 5th & 6th grade camps. This means that I have to plan and prepare two lessons from scratch every afternoon in addition to finishing prepping for the 3rd and 4th grade classes. It's doable, but it means I'm busy and guys, I'm done. I am out of energy, ready for vacation, ready to see my family and ready to not have to deal with students and lesson plans for a few weeks.

None of this ennui is helped by my normally lovely co-teacher. English camp is my responsibility; she's just around to fill out the paperwork and help with translations, so in the afternoon while I plan for camp the next day, she's taking a nap or watching TV. Not exactly conducive to creating a productive work environment, especially when all I really want to do is go curl up in the backroom with a book. I'm glad there are only three days left.


Adorable moppets!
The 3rd and 4th grade classes have been a joy, mostly because the students are undeniably adorable little moppets. Last week, we studied colors and foods, which meant lots of coloring activities. On Tuesday, I gave the students a worksheet with eight line drawings and told them how to color in the pictures. The carrots were orange and green. The dragon was blue, yellow and purple. The flower was green, yellow, orange, pink, blue and purple. "Teacher," my students groaned, "that's an ugly flower."


북 경률 likes chicken and doesn't like French fries, which I think is ridiculous. They taste so delicious together.
During the food unit, I had the students draw their favorite and least favorite foods, which was an interesting glimpse into their minds. While a few kids still claimed to dislike vegetables, no one claimed a processed food (pizza, french fries) or a desert as their favorite food. I doubt a survey of 20 American 3rd and 4th graders would found the same thing. Meat and fruit were popular favorite foods, while other students chose Korean dishes as their favorite food. I had to explain that in English, kimchi is still called kimchi and that while bulgogi technically translates to "fire meat," foreigners just call it bulgogi.


A truth universally acknowledged amongst 5th graders: big, fuzzy dice are awesome!
The 5th & 6th grade classes have been small - only six boys are regularly coming to the basic class, which is fine by me. Lessons have been a mixture of a review of topics we studied last semester and a preview of topics we will cover next semester. It's a bit of a cop out, but having six kids versus forty kids changes how I can teach a topic, especially difficult concepts such as prepositions. I gave the boys a piece of candy and told them what to do with the treat. "Put the candy on your head. Put the candy in your pencil case. Put the candy next to your eraser. Put the wrapper in my hand. Put the candy in your mouth!"

We studied houses and furniture (Lesson 12: This Is a Bedroom) on Thursday. As an activity, the boys drew and labeled their dream houses. There were the usual rooms - bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms - but the boys quickly grew tired of such plebeian rooms and dreamt up homes with PC방 (a LAN gaming center, a popular place in a country where Starcraft is the national sport and there are such things as professional computer gamers), ski slopes, department stores, subway stations, banks and their friend's house.


Left: Three PC방, two kitchens, one bathroom and one batroom! Right: I like the attention to detail - the ski slope has easy, medium and difficult slopes.
The 5th & 6th grade advanced class has continued reading Aesop's Fables. Last week we read, The Grasshopper and the Ants, The North Wind and the Sun and The Wolf and the Crane, and through the magic of Youtube, I showed the students video clips of the stories. I've had the kids do lots of writing exercises: they drew a cartoon version of The North Wind and the Sun and wrote down what they would have done as the characters in The Wolf and the Crane. Tomorrow, I'm gong to have them argue whether hunting is ethical. I'm not use to having this advanced a class, and it's been fun.


Drawing cartoons is srs bsns!

영어 캠프, Day One - A Bit of a Disaster

Today was the first day of English camp and it was a mild disaster. There are four different camps: 3rd & 4th Grade Basic, 3rd & 4th Grade Advanced, 5th & 6th Grade Basic and 5th & 6th Basic Advanced. I was under the impression that I would teach the two 3rd & 4th grade camps two periods a day this week and the two 5th & 6th grade camps two periods a day next week. I was wrong, and will actually be teaching all four groups one class every day for two weeks. I don't know if I misunderstood the schedule or if the schedule was changed at some point and I just wasn't notified, but I discovered the mix-up fifteen minutes before the 5th and 6th graders showed up. I wasted a few precious moments staring at my co-teacher with wide eyes and whispering that I had nothing prepared for the older students before rushing to my office to swear like a sailor and throw together two lesson plans.

It turned out okay. I taught the 5th & 6th grade basic class a beefed up version of the 3rd & 4th grade lesson and plied them with candy to make up for boring them. The 5th & 6th grade advanced class was saved by an Aesop's Fables easy reader textbook and the magic of Youtube. The girls read an abridged version of The Grasshopper and the Ants, answered the textbook provided listening comprehension questions, wrote their own summery of the story and then watched the 1934 Disney Silly Symphonies retelling of the story. God bless Youtube.

Considering how unprepared I was for the lesson, I'm impressed with how well my 6th grade girls did. This was 엄예솔's summery of the story:

Ants are saving food for winter.
But grasshopper doesn't working. (She struck out the -ing on her own.)
Winter come. Grasshopper was very hungry.
Grasshopper comes to ant house.
Ants and grasshopper eat together.

Pretty awesome, right? She flubs the tenses a bit, but that's a good summery of the story with no major grammatical mistakes, all in her own words. I count it as a win!


3rd & 4th Advanced class playing Go Fish. Assa!

[July, July, July // it never seemed so strange]

The spring semester ends on July 16th, which means I have two weeks of class left. Even less actually, since the end of the semester if rife with tests (yay, only one day of actual teaching next week!) and fact that the last period of the day has been canceled due to unknown reasons for the rest of the semester. It would have been nice to know in advance - I could have rushed the axed classes through the last lesson, or at least said goodbye to students I won't see again until September - but that sort of forewarning is asking an awful lot of a Korean school.

I could not be more ready for semester to be over. The kids are restless and ready for vacation to start. They're also far more preoccupied with their upcoming national exams than they are with Lesson 8: What Will You Do This Summer. (My favorite answers so far come from 6-5 class. One rather rotund little boy plans to eat 100 ice cream bars. Another simple wants some meat.) (That being said, I was super proud of my 5th graders today. They're normally highly unmotivated and well, not very bright, but I was trying to explain why "Let's go baseball" and "Let's play swimming" are incorrect. We ended up doing some brainstorming on the board and a decent number of students realized without being told that "Let's play..." was used when talking about games or musical instruments whereas "Let's go..." was used with locations or the present participle and I actually got examples that hadn't been used in class and just, that's a big deal. It was one of those moments where I could see the students understand the lesson and actually learning, and those moments are few and far between, especially with the 5th graders.)

I also had my last after school class last Thursday, which is probably for the best, since I had completely given up caring. I made the world's weakest attempt to teach comparisons, said "Oh, fuck this," half way through and gave the students a word search. And then we watched part of School of Rock. Between being sick and the classes being a joke in the first place, I just could not bring myself to care last week.


Not going to miss the classes. Am going to miss play time with 3rd graders.
Once the semester ends, I have two weeks of English camp. Last year I was ~super~ stressed out about the camps. This year, I'm far more confident in my ability to BS a lesson plan in the half an hour before class starts and subsequently way calmer. I will also have one of my regular co-teachers teaching with me, which means I'm not responsible for ever single facet of the camps myself. In fact, I'm so calm, I've yet to even begin planning. My co-teacher and I are going to the bookstore to buy textbooks for the camps tomorrow and I'll spend my days off next week writing up the lesson plans, but in general, I'm not worried.

Then, once the camps are over at the end of the month, my mama and little sister are coming to see me! We're going to spend a few days in Korea, and then hop over to China for ten days - five days in Beijing and five days in Shanghai! I am all sorts of excited about seeing (half) my family for the first time since February and getting to show them around Korea, and also going to China. And, of course, visitors from home means they can bring me things from home! Tell me, does anyone have any thoughts on the best way to transport hummus on an airplane?

Look, you're really cute, but I can't understand what you're saying

Today was my last day of English Camp! The goal of the 5th & 6th grade camp was reading and eh, we did read every day, but I just don't feel comfortable teaching reading. I know that I learned how to read at a very early age and that I haven't stopped since, but I don't really know how to teach someone else how to do it. You look at the page and read the words and then - voilà! - comprehension, knowledge, enlightenment. I can't even begin to figure out how to teach reading comprehension and when you take a kid who perhaps doesn't have the strongest reading skills to begin with and add a whole new language, you get a quagmire. Combine that with students who would. not. look up a word unless I beat them over the head with a dictionary, and by the end of the week I was ready to throw my hands up. We did read a story every day, but we mostly played a bunch of games and watched Finding Nemo.

I justified Finding Nemo by watching it in English (with Korean subtitles) and giving the kids a worksheet asking them question about the movie, even if I did have to prompt them on most of the questions. (Me: What's that? Kids: It's whale! Me: Look at question 10. [Name 10 animals that live in the ocean.] Kids: Oh yes Teacher!) My students loved it, as did every other student in the library, including those working with a tutor and complaining about how they wanted to go to English Camp. Whoops. Had I known English Camp would be held in the library before the day it started, I probably wouldn't have chosen to show a movie, but I wasn't about to rearrange my entire lesson plan once camp started and I was spending every moment trying to get ready. I did think this line was particularly apt:



Same, Same

영어 캠프! (Vignettes from English Camp)

On the last day of English Camp, as a review, I gave the kids a bunch of letter posters (I printed PowerPoint slides with the letters of the alphabet in different fonts) and let them decorate them.
Sarah arrived on Friday, but my vacation didn't start until Tuesday. On Monday, I had to go into school and teach my last day of English Camp. My first English camp was with the first and second graders and we studied the alphabet. I'm not sure how effective it was; half the kids clearly already knew the alphabet from their hogwons and the other half were floundering because trying to cover the entire alphabet is a lot for one week. Due to construction (all the classrooms are getting new floors, hopefully ones that don't give people splinters) class was held in the library. It's a nice library, very modern, but it was also full of crazy Korean robot children who spend their summer vacation studying in the school library. Every time I did something that was even remotely noisy, like play a game or speak in a slightly raised voice, I would have an instant audience of forty or fifty kids, only half of whom were my camp students.


I had some alphabet letters that had originally been bought for the English room. They were meant to be used on a felt board, but we just glued then on the letter posters.
I gave all the students English names on the first day of camp. I wasn't planning on it, but everyone seemed to assume they would get English names out of the deal and it certainly did make it easier to learn the kids' names. Coming up with a list of English names off the top of your head is surprisingly hard, so I used a website that randomly selected three popular English names and let the kids pick which one they liked best. The list was based on the most popular names in America for 2007 and wow, people name their kids some weird and gender-ambiguous names. There were a few traditional names like Jack and Amy, but there was also an Ashlyn, a Brayden, a Riley (boy) and a Kennedy (girl).


The idea was that the kids were suppose to decorate the posters with things that started with the letter. Some kids did better than others. Steven glued random letters onto his R poster. It ended up spelling ROJ.
To make each class a little more fun, I found a bunch of alphabet clips from Sesame Street and played them as we started. The kids loved them, and a few of the more outgoing boys would come up to the stage and dance to the music. My mother (of four children) always swore that Sesame Street was a really fun show, but I never believed her until now. I ended up spending a lot of time going through the archives on the Sesame Street website and wow, there are some really funny skits and some really talented musical guests, like Anderson Cooper reporting live from GNN or Tilly and the Wall singing the ABCs.


Audrey just drew some flowers and a heart around her (upside-down) Ss. I didn't have the heart to tell her the poster was upside-down.
I taught the kids to fist bump me when they did a good job or finished an assignment and they loved it. My siblings and I have been fist bumping each other and shouting, "Pound it!" for years, so it only seemed right to teach my students to do it too. The kiddos were *very* enthusiastic about the fist bumps and I spent the rest of the week nursing sore knuckles.


Caroline, on the other hand, did very well. Not only did she draw a glass (one of the examples from the textbook) and grapes (not one of the examples, she's just that smart), she wrote both words out phonetically in Hangul. She also wrote out G phonetically in Hangul (지 = gee). Gee is the name of a popular Kpop song that came out this spring. When we learned the letter G, half my students immediately started singing the song. I always appreciate it when Kpop helps with my lessons.
Sarah came with me to school on Monday and sat in on the class. The principal quickly learned that there were two - count them, two - foreigners in the building and came to the library to meet Sarah. The first time he stopped by we were in the middle of class so, after some mutual bowing, he left, but the second time he came by during a break, so I was able to introduce Sarah, my 미국인 친구 (American friend). Then he came back a third time, this time with a camera, and took a few pictures of me and Sarah. I imagine the photos will show up on the school website soon. What a great promotional picture to show the parents - look! we have TWO American teachers at our school, at least for a day. My kids were also fascinated by Sarah. When they first saw her, they hid behind me and asked, "Teacher! Who dat?" One of my second graders, Audrey, likes to tell me what color things are. "Teacher," she says, pointing at my shirt, "green! Brown (my skirt), red (my glasses), pink (her dress), blue (another student's shirt)." On Monday, she marched right up to me and Sarah and started telling me the colors. "Teacher, green (my pants), black (my shirt), purple (my glasses), red (Sarah's shirt)." Then she pointed at Sarah's blonde hair and said, "Teacher, yellow hair!" "Yes," I told her, "that is yellow hair." Sarah and I laughed about it for the rest of the trip.


It was a good activity, even if most of the kids didn't really grasp the whole point. Happy students are happy!

Things That Are Stressing Me Out, Part 1 in a List

Update time! Things have been super busy for the past few weeks and they're not likely to settle down for couple more. Reasons #1 why I've been looking a bit crazy about the eyes:

English camp: There is a six week summer break from July 20th to August 28th and during the break I will teach three English camps. There are specific goals of the camps (for example, the first and second graders are studying phonics), but it's less of an actual class and more fun times with the American teacher. We play a bunch of games, sing a few songs and hopefully the kids learn some English, or at least get a chance to use what they already know. I won't be teaching with my regular (beloved) co-teacher because she has a training program during the summer break. Instead, whoever ranks low enough on the totem pole and is available will show up to be my co-teacher. (I found out TODAY that the vice principal will be my co-teacher for an entire week, which is okay because at least he speaks English, but also stressful because he's my boss.) All of this means that I'm in charge of making the lesson plans and developing all the necessary materials.

I spent about a week in a mild panic over the lesson plans. (I seriously spent about a week staring at my computer with the crazy eyes and accomplished almost nothing.) I downloaded a bunch of sample lesson plans from other schools' camps and read them all and just could not process everything. Too much, too fast, too much and I was completely overwhelmed. Then I bought myself a cute little notebook (it has a panda lying in a field of clover telling me "you need a refresh") and started writing things down and breathing a bit deeper and lesson planning is going much better. That doesn't, however, mean it's going quickly. In the past week and a half, I've written the (super super detailed) lesson plans for half the camps. I've also stayed late every day this week. I'll be finished with the lesson plans by the time the first camp starts, but I'll still have to create all the necessary materials, which I had hoped to have already started by the end of this semester.

Part of the reason I'm so worried about these camps is that I've taught English camps before and it was a less than pleasant experience. I had a month of English camp during the winter break and the one time I wrote about them I said:

Part of the reason winter camps are going so well is that we always have all the materials we could possible need, primarily because I have five hours to prepare the day before. Need 180 flashcards for a game? Sure, I can make those. It's not like I'm doing anything else with my time. I'm going to run out of things to prepare soon, though. I've already started on next week's lessons.

The next week the camps collapsed into a disaster of awful, which just goes to show that you shouldn't be cocky on the Internet. The first and second grade camp, the only one where there was a textbook, went fine, but the rest were a disorganized, ill-prepared hot mess.

I think I know why they were such a disaster and can learn from those mistakes. I was looking at the lesson plans for the winter camp today and I scratched my head because, seriously, what the hell was I thinking? There was maybe thirty minutes of material to fill nearly two hours. And not only was there not enough material, it wasn't presented in a way that was conducive to learning. I think that was in part because my former co-teacher (who created most of the lesson plan) had no idea how to make a lesson plan, something she demonstrated practically every day, and in part because we were both new teachers and neither of us realized how much we relied on the textbook to provide structure for the lesson. Take away that structure and everything collapses in on itself. To compound matters, during all this Ji-Won failed the national teachers examination (for a second time) and just checked out for the rest of the year. She stopped coming to school, leaving other teachers to cover her position, which meant that I was in charge of creating everything we needed for the three hours of class, usually the afternoon before. I was staying late and coming early in a desperate attempt to get everything done by myself and even though I knew we didn't have enough planned, there wasn't any time to come up with more. It was an exhausting and disheartening few week. Luckily I left for two weeks of vacation the last day of camp and came back to Korea rejuvenated and no longer wanted to punch someone in the teeth, but you can see why I'm a bit stressed. Not to mention that it's a colossally huge amount of work that I only have a few weeks to do.

A few weeks ago I was telling a friend how stressed I was about the camps and she brushed me off as neurotic and high-strung and once I was done punching her in throat (no actual punching was involved), I did admit that she's sort of right. Things will go better this time. I know what went wrong the first time and I'm correcting those mistakes. I'm worrying and stressing about things now, when I have time to do something about them, rather than the day before the lesson. I'm a much better teacher than I was seven months ago. I know a lot more about how to plan a good lesson and I have a whole list (a literal list; it's in the panda notebook right next to the activities about food) of things I can fall back on if we start to run short. Things will be better this time, but that doesn't mean I'm not worried now.

Christmas in the Land of the Morning Calm

(click on the pictures to enbiggen)

Christmas from the Land of the Morning Calm! This was my first Christmas away from home, and I was worried I would be homesick, but I had a wonderful time. I was hoping for a white Christmas, but no luck. Instead, I got a white day before Christmas Eve, which really doesn't have the same ring. The snow was all gone by Christmas, and now the sidewalks are fraught with patches of stealth!ice, and the sand yard in front of my school is frozen and feels funny to walk on. It was nice while it lasted, though.

It was strange celebrating Christmas in a non-Christian country. Christmas is such a big deal in America, what with the decorations and the Christmas lights and the Christmas parties and Christmas music playing non-stop from every speaker in the country. For most of my life I didn't know what date Christmas was, which got me mocked by friends, but you don't *need* to remember the actual date. There's a big national countdown going on everywhere you look. Christmas in Korea is a lot more subtle. Only 25% of Korea is Christian, so there isn't much of a secular component to the holiday. A couple of store fronts were decorated and we sang Christmas carols in my fourth grade class last Friday (my co-teacher printed off a bunch of Christmas carols and asked me if I could teach them. I said sure, assuming she had music to go along, but no, all she's done was print off the lyrics and I had to sing all the songs a cappella so the kids could learn the tune), but Christmas snuck up on me this year. At least it's an important enough holiday for me to get the day off work.

I had English camp on Christmas Eve, and we had a Christmas party for the last period. I brought hot chocolate, my co-teacher brought chips and chocolate candies and some of the kids brought goodies from home. I gave the kids green and brown construction paper, and printed off a bunch of ornaments and we made Christmas trees. I played Christmas carols while they worked and taught them "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". My students kept feeding me chips. They wouldn't hand me the chips thought, they would only put them directly in my mouth, which they found hilarious. Ugg, first graders are so precious.

After school, I headed out to Siobhain's for Christmas, which was an adventure in itself. First, I got stuck in a massive human traffic jam at Sadang (my second least favorite subway stop) and ended up on the Inner Line instead of the Outer Line. It was easier to just take the train in the wrong direction to a less crowded subway stop and switch to the Outer Line instead of fighting my way back through that crowd, but it did add another twenty minutes to my trip. Then I got off at the wrong bus stop for Siobhain's apartment and ended up walking ten minutes in the opposite direction. I spent quite a bit of time on the phone with Siobhain's friend Tim as we tried to determine where I actually was.

Tim: Wait, can you see apartments around you? (Apartments are the most common thing in Korea. They are everywhere. I doubt there is anywhere in this entire country, much less Seoul, that isn't within site of at least three different apartment complexes.)
Cait: Yes, Tim. I'm still in Korea. I can still see apartments.
Tim: Oh... right.

I eventually made it to Siobhain's apartment. Siobhain's friend Tim, their friend Edward (I can not remember Edward's Korean name because a) I'm shit at names, b) I'm even worse with Korean names and c) he introduced himself as Edward, but, in case you were confused by the name, Edward is Korean) and I spent the night at Siobhain's. Siobhain, who actually has a *real* kitchen in her apartment AND knows how to cook made dinner while the rest of us sat around and drank. Because we're a real class act. I never got more than tipsy (turns out I meant that promise of never drinking again) but the boys were wasted. They decided to take shots of soju like Korean men, which means sitting on the floor and flicking the twisty part of the bottle cap until it came off, at which point the winner had to take a shot. There were no shot glasses, however, so they took what amounted to double or triple shots out of coffee mugs (one had a cartoon lion on it, the other was orange and had polka dots). And instead of traditional Korean bar food (which tastes like stale lint), they had a measuring glass of frosted flakes and rapidly cooling sweet potato tempura. And instead of, you know, being Korean men at a bar, they were an American and Korean sitting on the floor while Siobhain and I laughed at them. We played classic 90's power ballads and Ace of Base, exchanged gifts (I got a ridonkulous Korean pencil case!) and ended up on the roof with an ice cream cake at one in the morning. We sang "Happy Birthday" to Jesus and Mario, Jesus's mother (idk) and Tim reassured us that we had another bottle of chicken (he meant beer) before we passed out at three in the morning.

Christmas morning, Siobhain and I went to McDonald's for breakfast while the boys slept off the night before so we could talk louder than a hushed whisper. We ate and knit and talked for about an hour before the boys woke up and demanded food. We sat around and watched Iron Man before deciding to go to COEX, the largest underground shopping mall in Asia. Because of course, going to one of the largest malls in a very densely populated area on a national holiday is a *brilliant* idea. I did buy a new pair of shoes to replace my dying Chucks, though, so it was a worth while trip.

It was a good Christmas.  Albiet, it was nothing like Christmas back home, but fitting, I think, for my first Christmas on my own.

[now I'm crawling towards the sun]

Ah, winter break! My last day of regular classes was Friday; I won't see most of my students again until early February. I'm going to miss my fifth graders, but I'll be honest, the thought of not having to teach sixth grade for a month and a half makes me a bit giddy.

During the holidays, I'm teaching three English camps. The first camp (this week and next week) is phonics with the first and second graders. So far, English camp has been a lot of fun. I only have seventeen students, which is a refreshing change after my normal classes, which are around forty students each. It's actually possible to actually interact with all my students during the camps! For instance, it's nice to be able to walk around and actually look at all my kids' work when they doing workbook activities and, if they're having problems, be able to crouch down and help them without sacrificing the other students.

Also, since my normal classes are only third through sixth graders, this is the first time I've gotten to teach the little kids, which has been a blast. There's a lot less formal work; we mostly play games and sing songs with just a little bit of deskwork. Also, this is such a fun age group to work with. The kids are just so exciting to see me and be here and learn English, and there's very little pretence. Also, I can be a lot more tactile with the kids. There's one little girl who will not stay in her seat and rather than repeatedly tell her to sit down, I've started just scooping her up and plopping her down in her seat. The little girls love to erase the board after class, but they're too tiny to reach half the board, just I just pick them up and let them erase the board in my arms.

The only bad part about winter camps is that they end at 11:20, leaving five and a half hours of free time before I can go home. That's a lot of time to kill. Also, I can't spend the afternoons in my office. My school's so old there's no central heating. Each of the classrooms have a radiator, but all my office has is a space heater, which doesn't keep the room warm. The current temperature in my office is about 44° F. I'm sticking it out in the classroom. It's especially rough since many principals let their NES go home early during the winter vacation, but not mine. It's also a bit creepy; except for the two teachers in the office downstairs, I'm the only person in the school.

So far this week, I've spent my afternoons getting super prepared for class. Part of the reason winter camps are going so well is that we always have all the materials we could possible need, primarily because I have five hours to prepare the day before. Need 180 flashcards for a game? Sure, I can make those. It's not like I'm doing anything else with my time. I'm going to run out of things to prepare soon, though. I've already started on next week's lessons.