First Day of Class!

We made it through our first day of school! I’m not going to lie, I was pretty nervous waking up this morning and I’ve been kind of nervous for the whole teaching thing. I have babysat a lot and I would say I’m pretty good with little kids but I have never thought of myself as a teacher before and I was a little nervous to be in the front of the classroom.

Speaking of nervous, I used the crazy “shower” for the first time this morning! I was pretty skeptical about this whole shower in the sink concept, but it turns out I actually like it almost better than the regular showers back home! I mean the shower head just kind of hangs in the upper corner of the bathroom, like you probably saw from the pics I posted yesterday. But its falls right into the sink when it’s just hanging, so you just rotate it out a little bit and it goes past the sink onto yourself. I guess I just like it because I realized it’s pretty efficient, you can stand there and “shower” and brush your teeth and do everything else you need to do at the same time. I mean yeah everything gets wet, but if you don’t worry about it it’s not that big of a deal. The water doesn’t really get to the door and the little bit that does I just wiped off real quick with the dish towel once I was done. The electrical outlet has a cover on it and the toilet paper has a little metal shield that hangs down and covers it so all of that stuff doesn’t get wet. By the time I dried off and went out into my bedroom to get ready and came back into the bathroom, things were pretty much dry. You have “shower shoes”, kind of like jellies if any of you girls had those, that you wear while showering and then I just switch to my slippers when I leave. But it is still weird showering in the middle of the bathroom, I like it but I will have to get used to it. It’s weird that the shower situation was one of the things that most shocked us the first night and within a day I have gone to liking it!

So we ended up just observing the other teachers when we were at the school today. I sat in with Kevin Rice all day, a guy the three of us girls know from WSU. They call him “Kevin Teacher”, so I will be “Tia Teacher”! So the way it works is all the teachers have to be at the school by 9:00am. We left at 8:20ish this morning because we stopped in to get a bagel and some coffee before and it’s already about a 20-25 minute walk from our apartments. Kevin has five 40-minute class periods, and his don’t start until around 10am. So for the first hour or so he just kind of hangs out, sleeps a little more at his desk, reads, prepares for the days lessons, etc. Just whatever need to be done and then kills time. Anyway, so he has the same kids for the first two classes where he does work out of a workbook. He played a cd with stories on it, then had the kids repeat the story sentence by sentence and then answer a bunch of reading comprehension questions. Then they played some games like Hangman. The kids are soo cute! Apparently the ones in those first two classes are kind of rowdy and hard to discipline but I think they’re funny. Then again though I was just observing today and not actually acting as the teacher. So after the second class, somebody comes with the lunch and you like grab this big tray thing and some utensils for yourself. The kids all have their own try with compartments that has an attachable lid and they take it home each day for their parents to wash. So they reuse it each day and wash it at night. Anyway, the teacher serves each of the kinds, they sing a little “lunch song” (“thank you for this food, thank you mom, thank you dad, thank you farmer and thank you fisherman...” etc etc I don’t remember the whole thing) and then they eat! Today they had rice, soup, kimchi, squid, and these rice cake things that tasted just like really thick chunks of pasta. We ate the same thing but you also have time to leave the school and get something else if you want. We had an hour break after lunch so we went to go get some food and Kevin showed me around the main street of Dongtan. He pointed out some fun pubs and bars, a shabu-shabu restaurant (just like how you make it Dad!), good places to get pizza, and a bunch of other places we will probably want to check out! We got back to the school and had 3 more different classes and another hour long break, all up until 5pm. It was a long day but I’m excited to start teaching! This particular set of kids graduates in a couple weeks. So since Kevin and Daniel (the two guys here we know from WSU) are leaving this weekend, we will take over their classes for a week until graduation and then a whole new set of kids come starting in March. Speaking of graduating, the second class Kevin has right now is getting ready for the graduation presentation by memorizing speeches and a graduation song. The speeches are SO CUTE! The prompt is “If I had a magic genie and could wish for three things, those three things would be…” and then they respond by saying “My name is ___ and I would wish for…” The wishes are pretty hilarious. One of the boys’ first wish was to have all the clouds in the sky so he could make them into bread and then he would eat the bread and be able to fly high in the sky. Another’s wish was to be a King so he could eat all the spaghetti he wanted whenever he wanted. So funny! I couldn’t help but laugh they were just so creative and ridiculous.

Another interesting thing is that Kevin, Daniel, and the three girls who are here now all taught with Brown English Language School, the school Bri, Katie and I got our jobs with and signed contracts with. However, Brown just got bought by LCI, another school organization. So after the end of this week we will be working for LCI and we have to sign new contracts. Jade said the only thing that will change is the name of the school on the contract so that is good; we will definitely be re-reading them though just to make sure! I guess LCI runs a little bit of a tighter shift so the actual classroom curriculum will be stricter and more work than what we observed today. This new building also has cameras in the classroom so we can’t goof off with the kids like Kevin says he usually does! It’s also a little tough because all of the teachers that are already here said even though we observed them all day, things will probably be pretty different once the new set of kids comes and were officially working for LCI. Could get interesting!

Another interesting thing I learned today is about the kid’s ages. So I was asking Kevin and the student’s how old they were and Kevin kept saying “these are the sixes” or “these are sevens” instead of they’re six years old. I guess when you’re born in Korea, you start at age 1 and then once you hit January (the new year), you turn 2. So technically you could be born in December and within a month be 2 “years old”. So there are some 3 year olds in the level five classes. Interesting! A lot of these kids are really smart though and know a lot more than you would expect them to.

Tomorrow we have to go get “soft shoes”. They make you take your shoes off at the front door/porch and change into slippers for the rest of the day. Well you put your shoes on if you leave the school for any reason but the whole time you are inside you’re in the soft shoes. I get to work in slippers all day! We didn’t know that today since it was the first day so poor Katie and Brianna had to put their bare feet in the slippers they have there. I only had little footie socks on and it was soo cold all day! I guess we just missed the coldest weather spell in Korean history. The girls said they have to take taxis to work it was so cold they could not even walk outside!

Kevin and Daniel took us to this really great Vietnamese pho restaurant for dinner. I got the beef flank pho and Katie had a seafood pho dish. We ate octopus!! I was really surprised Katie tried it! She didn’t love it but she said she also didn’t hate it. I saw what looked like strips of the octopus in her pho and she thought it was sprouts. Kevin and I let her think that when she asked but she caught on after a few tries it was too funny. We took a taxi home from the restaurant since it was so cold and raining, a filling dinner and a taxi ride all for 8000 won… only about $7! Food and groceries and such are really cheap here, it’s so great. One of the girls told us she went to Thailand for a week with $500 and she was just crazy rich over there because everything is so cheap. Looking forward to that!

We have to “fast” tonight because Jade is taking us to the hospital tomorrow to get our health check up or whatever. We have to get blood drawn so that’s why we have to fast. I’m glad I got so full at dinner! We get our alien cards in a couple weeks and after we get those we can set up a bank account that we can wire money from, or get a type of debit card we can use over here. The girls that are already here said it took them almost 3 months to get completely and totally settled in, aka set their rooms up and have all the furniture and curtains, get their bikes to ride to school, have bank accounts set up, know where to buy groceries, just all the things we will learn eventually. Can’t wait to get to that point!

Thats all for now. Lots of Love!!