I Was There
NOTE: Again, this was written at two different times: Friday and today (Tuesday morning). Sorry for the awkwardness... -_-;
Happy Friday! I am on my first off period of the day after working two classes back to back. I just have one more class during the last period and then...I'm going to Busan!
Before I talk about my weekend, I should mention that my co-teacher--let's just call her Y--and I have a demo class coming up next month. Demo classes almost always strike a chord of utter fear amongst the Korean teachers at my school, but I can't quite figure out why. Yes, you have about twenty teachers and the district head observing your class, but if you don't have anything to hide, it shouldn't be too stressful, right?
It's not the case. I've seen maybe six or seven demo classes and they've all been incredibly awkward. Actually, they're more like...painful. The Korean teacher freaks out a month or two in advance and tries to create a new classroom structure, but the kids are so unused to it that they just look confused and silent. Also, the role of the Korean teacher is usually that of translator or disciplinarian when it's needed. My co-teachers rarely speak English to the classes. However, in these demo classes, the Korean teacher is suddenly speaking ONLY English and acting like it happens every day. After these demos, I talk to the foreign teacher and they usually roll their eyes and say something like, "My co-teacher has never once offered to help lesson plan but for this, I wasn't allowed to plan anything. She/he also never speaks in English during the class...this is just a show." Indeed, the demo classes are run more like a circus, with the teachers trying to showcase TOO many "fresh" ideas about teaching. They are almost always unrealistic, idealistic, and just plain silly. I saw one this week and that was the exception.
So Y and I have one of these coming up. When she told me, I wasn't surprised because...we just got the new English zone as a "gift" from the district and this is one of the ways we "pay" them back. The other teachers had freaked out and argued that they didn't have time to do it and, in fact, would absolutely not do it. It got pushed to Y, who has returned to school after almost two years of maternity leave. She's by far the most ambitious of the group and she also happens to have fantastic English skills.
Since we are supposed to show fresh, interesting methods of teaching, she brought up station teaching as an option. She printed off some internet pages about it and showed it to me. Basically, there are four stations set up in the classroom and each station has a different goal (writing, reading, speaking, translating). Y will run one station and I will run another. For the other two, we assign a group leader who will be in charge of that table's tasks. It sounded promising and we decided to test it out this week.
It's actually gone...very well. The kids are a little overwhelmed with the constant relocations they need to make, but I think they appreciate a shake up in the classroom style. Also, this way, I can spend almost ten minutes with about 7-8 students, meaning I can have more personal time with them. It's so easy for a student to disappear in a class of 36, so this makes it more...human?
After our first two classes of station teaching, we stuck around in the English Zone to discuss the results. We both agreed that it needs some tweaking but were optimistic about continuing with it. It's cool how she's so comfortable and confident about this whole demo thing. I am not worried about it at all, but I know a lot of other Korean teachers would be freaking out. When I confessed that I wasn't nervous about it all, she grinned and said, "You know, I'm not nervous about it either. I'm with you! Our classes are good together. We'll be fine."
Honestly, it's making me a bit worried about my plan to stop teaching in March. I'm starting to resent a lot about the party lifestyle and am worried that if I work for a magazine, I won't get paid enough and I will also be constantly surrounded by the things that aren't "good influences." The more annoyed I grow at the party scene, the more I appreciate teaching. The question of "what's the best way to help these kids?" just seems infinitely more important than "what's the best way to get lots of hot girls and rich guys to come to this party?"
TUESDAY:
The weekend in Busan was most definitely needed. I took a vow of no partying or clubbing, which meant I ended up hanging out with soju on the beach or at Family Mart. eating raw fish, and just relaxing. While it meant skipping out on a private party with Josh Hartnett and missing a Daishi Dance show, I didn't have any real regrets. Four of us took the train down on Friday night, met up with a few friends while there, and went back up to Seoul on Sunday morning. It was a short trip, for sure, but we all agreed that we'd needed something--anything--outside of Seoul.
I also decided that I needed to drop out of the party planning group. It's been stressing me out and it really isn't quite in line with my personality or beliefs, so...once I made the decision, I felt infinitely better. I'll still go to some parties but it won't be this kind of obligation to be seen everywhere.
On a bad note, my school informed me that I'd no longer get paid for my after school classes. SMOE's contract states that we are supposed to teach 22 classes a week and anything over that counts as overtime, meaning we'd get paid extra. When I first came to my school, I was teaching 21 hours a week and my school kind of lied on the forms to ensure that I would get paid for all my after school classes. But schools in Korea have been downsizing in the last year, meaning I only have 18 classes to teach. There are only 8 1st year classes instead of the standard 10. It's impossible for me to teach more than that, and now, I can't get paid for my after school classes. This is one of those times where it feels like the Korean system is trying to make things difficult for us. I don't know anyone teaching 22 classes a week and SMOE refuses to lower the number to something more realistic (like 20). I already teach more classes than any other teacher at my school (18 regular classes plus 6 hours of extra class a week), since most of the teachers teach about 15-17 classes a week with maybe one extra class (if that. One of my co-teachers told me that other teachers have the choice to flat out refuse, but we don't).
Sometimes, it's easy to get the feeling that the school system here is forgetting that we're actual humans. They can't understand when we want more than two weeks of vacation (gee, our friends and families live halfway around the world, god forbid we want to spend more than two jet-lagged weeks with them a year), they don't care that we have to come into work when no one else does only to sit there with nothing to do (called "desk warming", it's a popular thing for principal's to order English teachers to do. Come in during winter vacation when everyone is off, sit in the office with no heat, and stay there until 4:30), etc. It's like...they wonder why we don't speak Korean better or know the culture better, but we don't get any government discounts on language courses (which can be pretty expensive at the universities), we can't use our days with no classes to go on cultural trips, we aren't invited to over half of the school functions ("Oh, I didn't think you'd want to go so no one told you"),,,it's just so frustrating sometimes. Or they wonder why Korea has such a bad reputation among expats.
I've heard that a lot of people reach the peak of the Korean love-hate relationship by their third year. After that, people tend to make peace with their situation or the opposite: become a hardcore angry hater. I don't like feeling bitter or angry but a lot of policies and opinions here drive me absolutely insane. People say, "So you want to live here forever?" Yeah, right. No way. I see so many posts on the forums talking about Korean life like it's some kind of fantasy land: everyone is healthy, skinny, has beautiful skin, the boys are hot but polite, the students are hardworking and respectful, etc...and I just want to laugh. So many people who spout of this kind of thing are the people that just come to live with their grandparents or relatives for a few weeks in the summer, but they never get an accurate picture of the lifestyle. A tourist in any country can rave about how great things are. Try living there. So many Korean-American college grads come here with their "Korean Pride", bashing the US left and right, but a few months into it, are desperately homesick and bitter.
Okay, er...I brought this post down to a fairly depressing level. I'll just post the pictures now...
1. Haneul Park (Sky Park)
A few weeks ago, Dean and I made the trek up to Haneul Park. We had a half-day and wanted to visit it when it would be relatively empty.
2. I'm So
I'm So is a new bar/restaurant in Sinsa, We've held a few parties there in the past month. At first, I thought it was a really strange name for a bar, but then I got there and it clicked. They have a slew of stickers with adjectives as well as I'm So t-shirts, so you can get drunk and slap some amusing words onto yourself and your friends. I'm so...smart, gorgeous, sexy, hot, cranky, kitschy, fashionable, flirtatious, flimsy, fresh, etc. It makes for a good party.
3. Busan
On Saturday night, we went to a small but crazy amusement park on Gwangalli Beach. I'm not so into rides, so I took pictures of everyone. The rides were violent but pretty amusing.
4. School + Extra
I brought some of the I'm So stickers to school and gave them to some of the kids. They loooved the "바보" sticker.
"Nana" and "DeeDee" sharing my scarf in extra class yesterday.
Blue awkwardly sits atop Dean's shoulder cat named "Azul." I can't imagine it was very comfortable. I know cats are weird, but Blue has really strange manners of sitting. He loves to half-sit, half-stand, where he is all comfy in the front but standing up in the back. I don't get it.
Ok, last but not least, does the girl on the left look familiar to you at all?
We've hung out with her a few times, since she is the girlfriend of one of our friends. She's very sweet and friendly. Turns out, she is this chick:
the famous "elf girl" or "Miss World Cup Korea" of 2006, Han Jang Hee. Craziness.
ALSO...I'm going to be starting a photoblog soon and I need a name for the domain. Right now, it's narrowed down to:
www.theloveremix.com
www.iamthebluecat.com
www.braveandblue.com
Advice?
Happy Friday! I am on my first off period of the day after working two classes back to back. I just have one more class during the last period and then...I'm going to Busan!
Before I talk about my weekend, I should mention that my co-teacher--let's just call her Y--and I have a demo class coming up next month. Demo classes almost always strike a chord of utter fear amongst the Korean teachers at my school, but I can't quite figure out why. Yes, you have about twenty teachers and the district head observing your class, but if you don't have anything to hide, it shouldn't be too stressful, right?
It's not the case. I've seen maybe six or seven demo classes and they've all been incredibly awkward. Actually, they're more like...painful. The Korean teacher freaks out a month or two in advance and tries to create a new classroom structure, but the kids are so unused to it that they just look confused and silent. Also, the role of the Korean teacher is usually that of translator or disciplinarian when it's needed. My co-teachers rarely speak English to the classes. However, in these demo classes, the Korean teacher is suddenly speaking ONLY English and acting like it happens every day. After these demos, I talk to the foreign teacher and they usually roll their eyes and say something like, "My co-teacher has never once offered to help lesson plan but for this, I wasn't allowed to plan anything. She/he also never speaks in English during the class...this is just a show." Indeed, the demo classes are run more like a circus, with the teachers trying to showcase TOO many "fresh" ideas about teaching. They are almost always unrealistic, idealistic, and just plain silly. I saw one this week and that was the exception.
So Y and I have one of these coming up. When she told me, I wasn't surprised because...we just got the new English zone as a "gift" from the district and this is one of the ways we "pay" them back. The other teachers had freaked out and argued that they didn't have time to do it and, in fact, would absolutely not do it. It got pushed to Y, who has returned to school after almost two years of maternity leave. She's by far the most ambitious of the group and she also happens to have fantastic English skills.
Since we are supposed to show fresh, interesting methods of teaching, she brought up station teaching as an option. She printed off some internet pages about it and showed it to me. Basically, there are four stations set up in the classroom and each station has a different goal (writing, reading, speaking, translating). Y will run one station and I will run another. For the other two, we assign a group leader who will be in charge of that table's tasks. It sounded promising and we decided to test it out this week.
It's actually gone...very well. The kids are a little overwhelmed with the constant relocations they need to make, but I think they appreciate a shake up in the classroom style. Also, this way, I can spend almost ten minutes with about 7-8 students, meaning I can have more personal time with them. It's so easy for a student to disappear in a class of 36, so this makes it more...human?
After our first two classes of station teaching, we stuck around in the English Zone to discuss the results. We both agreed that it needs some tweaking but were optimistic about continuing with it. It's cool how she's so comfortable and confident about this whole demo thing. I am not worried about it at all, but I know a lot of other Korean teachers would be freaking out. When I confessed that I wasn't nervous about it all, she grinned and said, "You know, I'm not nervous about it either. I'm with you! Our classes are good together. We'll be fine."
Honestly, it's making me a bit worried about my plan to stop teaching in March. I'm starting to resent a lot about the party lifestyle and am worried that if I work for a magazine, I won't get paid enough and I will also be constantly surrounded by the things that aren't "good influences." The more annoyed I grow at the party scene, the more I appreciate teaching. The question of "what's the best way to help these kids?" just seems infinitely more important than "what's the best way to get lots of hot girls and rich guys to come to this party?"
TUESDAY:
The weekend in Busan was most definitely needed. I took a vow of no partying or clubbing, which meant I ended up hanging out with soju on the beach or at Family Mart. eating raw fish, and just relaxing. While it meant skipping out on a private party with Josh Hartnett and missing a Daishi Dance show, I didn't have any real regrets. Four of us took the train down on Friday night, met up with a few friends while there, and went back up to Seoul on Sunday morning. It was a short trip, for sure, but we all agreed that we'd needed something--anything--outside of Seoul.
I also decided that I needed to drop out of the party planning group. It's been stressing me out and it really isn't quite in line with my personality or beliefs, so...once I made the decision, I felt infinitely better. I'll still go to some parties but it won't be this kind of obligation to be seen everywhere.
On a bad note, my school informed me that I'd no longer get paid for my after school classes. SMOE's contract states that we are supposed to teach 22 classes a week and anything over that counts as overtime, meaning we'd get paid extra. When I first came to my school, I was teaching 21 hours a week and my school kind of lied on the forms to ensure that I would get paid for all my after school classes. But schools in Korea have been downsizing in the last year, meaning I only have 18 classes to teach. There are only 8 1st year classes instead of the standard 10. It's impossible for me to teach more than that, and now, I can't get paid for my after school classes. This is one of those times where it feels like the Korean system is trying to make things difficult for us. I don't know anyone teaching 22 classes a week and SMOE refuses to lower the number to something more realistic (like 20). I already teach more classes than any other teacher at my school (18 regular classes plus 6 hours of extra class a week), since most of the teachers teach about 15-17 classes a week with maybe one extra class (if that. One of my co-teachers told me that other teachers have the choice to flat out refuse, but we don't).
Sometimes, it's easy to get the feeling that the school system here is forgetting that we're actual humans. They can't understand when we want more than two weeks of vacation (gee, our friends and families live halfway around the world, god forbid we want to spend more than two jet-lagged weeks with them a year), they don't care that we have to come into work when no one else does only to sit there with nothing to do (called "desk warming", it's a popular thing for principal's to order English teachers to do. Come in during winter vacation when everyone is off, sit in the office with no heat, and stay there until 4:30), etc. It's like...they wonder why we don't speak Korean better or know the culture better, but we don't get any government discounts on language courses (which can be pretty expensive at the universities), we can't use our days with no classes to go on cultural trips, we aren't invited to over half of the school functions ("Oh, I didn't think you'd want to go so no one told you"),,,it's just so frustrating sometimes. Or they wonder why Korea has such a bad reputation among expats.
I've heard that a lot of people reach the peak of the Korean love-hate relationship by their third year. After that, people tend to make peace with their situation or the opposite: become a hardcore angry hater. I don't like feeling bitter or angry but a lot of policies and opinions here drive me absolutely insane. People say, "So you want to live here forever?" Yeah, right. No way. I see so many posts on the forums talking about Korean life like it's some kind of fantasy land: everyone is healthy, skinny, has beautiful skin, the boys are hot but polite, the students are hardworking and respectful, etc...and I just want to laugh. So many people who spout of this kind of thing are the people that just come to live with their grandparents or relatives for a few weeks in the summer, but they never get an accurate picture of the lifestyle. A tourist in any country can rave about how great things are. Try living there. So many Korean-American college grads come here with their "Korean Pride", bashing the US left and right, but a few months into it, are desperately homesick and bitter.
Okay, er...I brought this post down to a fairly depressing level. I'll just post the pictures now...
1. Haneul Park (Sky Park)
A few weeks ago, Dean and I made the trek up to Haneul Park. We had a half-day and wanted to visit it when it would be relatively empty.
2. I'm So
I'm So is a new bar/restaurant in Sinsa, We've held a few parties there in the past month. At first, I thought it was a really strange name for a bar, but then I got there and it clicked. They have a slew of stickers with adjectives as well as I'm So t-shirts, so you can get drunk and slap some amusing words onto yourself and your friends. I'm so...smart, gorgeous, sexy, hot, cranky, kitschy, fashionable, flirtatious, flimsy, fresh, etc. It makes for a good party.
3. Busan
On Saturday night, we went to a small but crazy amusement park on Gwangalli Beach. I'm not so into rides, so I took pictures of everyone. The rides were violent but pretty amusing.
4. School + Extra
I brought some of the I'm So stickers to school and gave them to some of the kids. They loooved the "바보" sticker.
"Nana" and "DeeDee" sharing my scarf in extra class yesterday.
Blue awkwardly sits atop Dean's shoulder cat named "Azul." I can't imagine it was very comfortable. I know cats are weird, but Blue has really strange manners of sitting. He loves to half-sit, half-stand, where he is all comfy in the front but standing up in the back. I don't get it.
Ok, last but not least, does the girl on the left look familiar to you at all?
We've hung out with her a few times, since she is the girlfriend of one of our friends. She's very sweet and friendly. Turns out, she is this chick:
the famous "elf girl" or "Miss World Cup Korea" of 2006, Han Jang Hee. Craziness.
ALSO...I'm going to be starting a photoblog soon and I need a name for the domain. Right now, it's narrowed down to:
www.theloveremix.com
www.iamthebluecat.com
www.braveandblue.com
Advice?
TAGS
Comments
anyways, i vote braveandblue, then theloveremix, then iamthebluecat~ will be looking forward to the photoblog!
theloveremix
:)
elf girl is hott!
& u always look so cute... how do u do it!??!?!
:)
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