Vacation!

I've been friends with Sarah since high school. We met when I first moved to North Carolina in 8th grade, but I mostly remember her as that girl who skipped very violently and she says I was the new girl with the weird pig lunch bag. We had the same PE class in 9th grade though, and ended getting in a long conversation about Harry Potter and how, seriously, was child services never called? We've been friends ever since.

Sarah is currently serving in the Peace Corps in Tonga (in the South Pacific), but right now, she's in Korea visiting me! (She's currently on the floor of my apartment watching Gossip Girls. Korean internet is a tad bit faster than Tongan internet.) This is super exciting for a number of reasons. I haven't seen anyone from home for the past ten months AND I'm getting the next two weeks off school.

Taking a vacation at home, especially when you have a guest, is a new experience. I'm enjoying taking the opportunity to really look at my city. I tend to get stuck in a rut, hanging out with my friends and ignoring all the things Korea has to offer. On Saturday, Sarah and I went to Insadong, a shopping district in northern Seoul. Insadong mostly sells traditional Korean objects: hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper), celadon pottery, silk bags and fans.


There will be loads of posts coming, but right now I'm just going to enjoy Sarah's visit and my vacation.

Deoksugung

A few weeks ago I visited Deoksugung, one of the five grand palaces of Seoul. Deoksugung, the smallest of the palaces, is located across the street from City Hall. It first became a royal palace in 1592 after the Japanese invaded and burnt all the rest. In 1897, King Gojang founded the Great Han Empire and made Deoksugung his primary palace. (It was a very short great empire. Thirteen years later, the Japanese invaded again, forced King Gojang to resign and burnt some more palaces. Always with the invading and the burning. It's no wonder the Koreans dislike them so much.)

I originally visited Deoksugung because I wanted to see their traditional changing of the guard ceremony, but when I showed up, there was a sign saying the ceremony had been canceled and hundreds (literally) of police officers were sitting in front of the main gates. The palace was still open though, so I sidled through the crowd and went to take a look.


Junghwajeon Hall was the main throne hall of Deoksugung. It's a new building, only built in 1902. King Gojang would have conducted official state affairs and greeted foreign dignitaries here.


In front of Junghwajeon Hall are two lines of court stones. Court stones are engraved stone tablets that indicate where each civil and military official of the court was to stand during official ceremonies.


Seokjojeon is a western style building next to Junghwajeon Hall, built in an attempt to modernize the Great Han Empire. It was completed in 1910 and housed the emperor's sleeping quarters and audience hall. It was a bizarre juxtaposition; this neoclassical building surrounded by traditional Korean architecture.


The grassy area in front of the fountain was off limits, but that didn't stop the children from exploring the fountain. A whole pile of them hopped over the rope fence to get a look and enjoy running around in the fresh grass.


Behind Seokjojeon there is a small, forested garden. The high rises of modern Seoul are visible from most of the palace, but in the garden is was possible to get away from the city for a few minutes and just enjoy the nature.

The full set of photos (with commentary) is here.

[if it keeps on rainin' // levee's goin' to break]

It's summer in Korea, which means it's hot and wet and probably raining. All Koreans will proudly tell you that Korea has four distinct seasons, which is true. What they don't mention is 장마, the East Asian monsoon that inundates Korea with rain from late June to early August. This week was especially wet, with major rain storms Sunday, Tuesday and Friday.


On Tuesday, after eight solid hours of torrential rain, the storm drains and gutters near my school couldn't no longer handle the water and the path behind my school, which leads from the middle and high schools to the major apartment complex in town, flooded. When I needed a break from lesson planning, I hung out my office window and watched the middle school students shriek as they realized they would have to wade through calf deep water to get home.

The rain was hard enough that my school has some minor flooding. We don't have an an air conditioner at my school, so we rely on opening windows to make being inside bearable. Usually this works pretty well: all the classrooms have sixteen large windows (half of one wall) and the hallway is lined with windows. If all the windows are open and you leave the doors open, you can get a nice cross breeze. Add the six 선풍기 (electric fans mounted on the ceiling) in the classrooms and it isn't too bad. This means that on Tuesday, despite the heavy rain, all the windows in the school were open. Tuesday afternoon the rain started blowing sideways, right through the open windows and into the hallway on the top floor. By the time we realized what had happened, there was an a quarter inch of water in the halls and we got to bail out the hallway with dustpans.

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.