So despite my lack of blogging and updates, I am still alive and well in Korea. The past month has flown by and I still feel as if I haven't done anything worth mentioning but here is a little update about what's been going on the past month and a half!
When we got back from Jeju (March 3rd..) we started our new semester of classes! I was really sad that my kindergarten graduated and I was getting a new class but I was also excited too. I can't even remember what I wrote in the past, so I apologize if I've already written this!
Kindergarten- My new kindergarten class is a 6-year-old class and they don't know ANY English. It's been a lot different because my last class was a 7-year-old class but they had also already had English for one year before I started teaching them. After about a month and a half of teaching them, I think there are some ups and downs of both ages. My old class, not only did they know English, I only had 6 students which was WONDERFUL. Now, I have 9 students who don't know anything, four boys and five girls. It is really quite amazing how fast they pick up on stuff though. The material though is easier to teach, since we are learning such basics. We use a lot of flashcards and a lot of repeating! It's a lot different too because they don't even know the alphabet and a lot of sounds in our alphabet, aren't in the Korean alphabet. They only have 14 consonants. The most confusing for Koreans, are the letters "R" and "L" because they are one in the same in Korean. So our teachers like Rachel, and our friend Laura who finished in March are sometimes called Lacher Teacher or Rara Teacher! I had a lot of difficultly with the class at first, especially with one little boy in particular who liked to color all over his book, leave the classroom when he felt liked it, run around the halls, lay on the ground during class, make distracting noises, etc. So that was quite the challenge... He's gotten a lot better though after almost 2 months. Thank God!
Overall, I really like my kindergarten. At first, I was sad because I wasn't as close with them as my old class. My old class could tell me things they were excited about and I could joke with them. They would want to sit on my lap and give me hugs everyday. My new class didn't do this right away but slowly they've become more used to me and I'd like to think they like me. If they don't, they don't know how to say it in English yet so I guess I'll never know!
The worst day was in the end of March, I actually cried in front of my class. It had been all this stress building up from the boy I mentioned above and I cracked. I don't just mean my eyes watering either, I was actually crying and I couldn't stop I was so frustrated. It was during "Science" which is on Thursday afternoons and its always these difficult crafts that they can't really understand the "science" behind them anyway and it's basically the teachers who have to put them all together for them. I always hated science before with my old class but I only have 6 to deal with and they could do some of it on their own. This time, it was some stupid Eagle cutout thing and I don't think there was a minute that went by where at least half the class wasn't saying "Help me, please"! Not to mention, it was almost time to go and their backpacks weren't packed, half the sciences weren't finished and my trouble boy had just hit someone. So, I cried. I had one breakdown my first six months getting used to working here, and I guess that was my one breakdown for this 6 months, so I should be good to go. I guess I'll never have difficulty answering an interview question, "Name a time when you were in a stressful situation and how you handled it" (I just won't tell them that I started bawling...)!
Otherwise, my other classes are fine. I don't have a break in my schedule this time so I'm a lot busier with my new schedule. I have 21 essays to grade a week whereas last semester I would get about 10. I have to stay late a lot more but I also get paid more so I guess it's ok.
This upcoming month is really busy though and I'm not looking forward to it. Since I work at a hagwon, a private English school, we have "open class" where the parents all come and watch your class for a day. It won't be that bad the actual day of because we practice with the kids all the stuff we're going to do so they know what's coming up (of course the parents don't know that)... But it's all the preparing that is going to be hard. Not to mention, our school got new wallpaper and decided that it's up to us to decorate the rooms, perfect timing! :)
Anyways, enough about work! Spring is finally here in Korea (except this weekend it rained, after a beautiful week where we were stuck inside, of course!). I haven't done much this past month because I have been training for my half marathon which is next weekend. We planned to go to a baseball game last weekend for the LG Twins but it was sold out which was a bummer. I have a long list of things I'm going to do in May and June though that will be finally something worth telling about.
Since we couldn't go to the Twins game, we went out to eat and got a new dish called Shabu Shabu which was really good, really spicy, but good. It's a big bowl of spicy soup that is really hot (temperature hot) and you add vegetables into it and cook those. Then they bring you really thin slices of meat, we got pork, chicken and beef and you dip it into the soup to cook it. I of course had to get some rice because my mouth was burning so bad! I really am going to miss the Korean style of eating where it's just everything shared on the table and big community meals.
I think that's about it, now that I'm looking back, March and April have seemed pretty lame! I did go see The Hunger Games, which was good, but not as good as the books obviously. This weekend we went and saw Titanic in 4D which was really cool, the seats moved, they had light mist spray when water splashed, puffs of air when it was like gunshots or people being punched. I really liked it. It was 18 dollars so I wouldn't do it for every movie I saw but Titanic was definitely a good movie to see. I forgot a lot about the movie and how sad it was.
I did put up some new pictures, some of my new kindergarten and a lot of cherry blossoms. I was more experimenting with my camera. It rained a lot this weekend so a lot of the blossoms fell but the other trees are started to get their leaves back now so that's exciting! I've had a head cold for about a month now though and I'm hoping it's just the change of seasons since the doctor's antibiotics that I tried, twice, didn't seem to do much! Oh the joy of working with children!
http://s1068.photobucket.com/profile/mfaricy2/index
See you in 4 months Minnesota!
Love,
Meghan
No comments:
Post a Comment