The Semester So Far

The last two weeks seem like they have absolutely flown by. I'm starting to feel a bit more settled in at my new apartment. I think I've finally figured out the best way to get to and from work. It's quite interesting. I can take a single bus to work, but I can't take that same bus home. It comes back to this same general area, but the bus stop is rather awkwardly placed. I can't walk to my apartment from it, because of the way all of the roads and such work. There just aren't sidewalks, and there are lots of highways with fast cars. So, I take a bus to work, and I take a bus, a subway and another bus back home.

Things seem to be going pretty well at work. There are some rather long days. On Monday, my first class starts at 9:00, and my last class finishes at 8:50. When you factor in that I usually get in a bit before my first class so I can collect my thoughts and materials (plus the whole public transportation issue) combined with going back to my office to return books and papers after the class, Monday is starting to look like a 13 hour day.

My office mates seem to be friendly so far. There are five of us in the office, although we all have our own computers. I'm the only woman in the office, which  has the potential to get interesting... There is one other American, although he doesn't seem to be in the office much. To my immediate left is a Kiwi, and then there are two Brits. I also have two TA's that I work with. One of them works for the whole department, and she is more of an administrative assistant. The second TA just works with me, and she will be helping me with grading and such during the semester.

I've met almost all of my students so far. Most of the classes meet twice a week, so I didn't meet all of them until yesterday. I'm going to try hard to learn their names, but I don't know if I'll actually be able to pull off 200 Korean names when I only see them twice a week... Some of them I only see once a week, for three hour classes. The girls all seem to be sweet. They have been a bit shy so far, but that's pretty normal in an English classroom in Korea. There are a few of them that seem like they will be characters in a good way, and there are also some that seem like they could be characters in a bad way.

Most of the classes I teach are just normal speaking and writing classes. I teach speaking level 1 (our current lesson focuses on "My name is ___________ and I'm from ___________") and writing 2 (we are focusing on four different types of paragraphs throughout the semester). I'm also teaching one section of writing through the Language Center. Those classes don't start for another few weeks, so I'm not entirely sure what they entail yet. I teach a one hour a week study group on speech and debate, facilitate a one hour a week book group, and my last thing is a level 4 English class.

The level 4 class is supposed to be a content class rather than a language class. They told me I could choose any topic I wanted, so I came to the first class with a few ideas, and the girls and I narrowed them down to make a class. We are doing a class on storytelling in English. It will have two primary parts. We will read different types of stories from all around the world, then we will focus on how to effectively tell stories. If you think about it, stories are something that we use every single day. If someone says, "How was your day?" they are inviting you to tell them a story. Jokes are stories. Some of our idioms are stories. When you tell a story, it uses a different kind of language than is found in a typical ESL textbook. Also, vocal inflection is one of the hardest things for my students to master, so this will give us a good chance to practice both. Plus, who doesn't love stories??

Basically, things have been quite busy, and I've been scattered all over the place. On Saturday, I was a guest professor at another women's university in Seoul, for a program for their English Education majors. On Sunday, I went up and spent the whole day at the DMZ. Monday was a crazy day at work, and today has been filled with sleeping, laundry and grocery shopping.

Tomorrow it's back to work for another day, although my teaching schedule is significantly lighter. I only have two classes tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get a chance to work through all of my pictures from the DMZ and write up some stuff about that soon!