A Typical Tuesday

Some of you have asked, "What do you do every day?" So, I thought I'd walk you through what a basic day looks like in the life of an English teacher in Korea.

I wake up between 6-6:30 most days. Long gone are the days when I could wake up at 7:45 to make it to an 8:00 class. I've discovered that I have to be much more awake to teach an 8:00 class than I did to sit in an 8:00 class. So I usually get ready, drink some tea and listen to some music before I head to school.

Once I'm ready to go, I head out the door to the subway. I usually leave sometime around 7:20 for the subway station, although I can leave as late as 7:37 and still catch a train to be on time for my class. Not that I've ever done that.... I live about a 5 minute walk from the subway station, then three stops on the train, plus a ten minute walk on the other end to get to my campus. The whole commute takes about 25-30 minutes. The train is always quite full, and I usually have to fight my way through crowds of people going up and down stairs in the stations.

I get to my classroom and turn on my computer and get all of my papers laid out for the day. My students usually start to trickle in around 7:50, so we make small talk until it's time to start class. My 8:00 class this semester is pretty advanced for my university. They are doing a significant amount of writing as well as normal conversation and grammar work. Today, the 8:00 class learned about idiomatic uses for the word "sick". We talked about being sick and tired of something, sick days, airsick, lovesick, etc. It can get quite confusing to explain how one word can be involved in so many different meanings.

Next up is my IT English class at 9:00. I have to move to a different building for this class. This is probably the most difficult class I teach. It is significantly larger than my normal classes. The students have widely varied levels of English. The biggest problem is that I can't find a way to get these kids to stop speaking Korean to each other. They all talk, all the time. I've had to turn into Scary Teacher Sarah several times with this group, and it just doesn't always work. Today they were supposed to be doing presentations, but shockingly, they weren't all as prepared as they should have been so it was pretty rough.

After I'm done teaching the normal morning classes, I have a few minutes to catch my breath and figure out the rest of my day. I typically use the rest of the morning hours for lesson planning, grading, advising meetings, staff/faculty meetings, or my Korean lesson, which is every Thursday morning. All of that is TERRIBLY exciting stuff, I assure you ;)

My co-worker Renae and I always go to lunch together. We often go to the school cafeteria to try to test our luck and see if there is anything edible there. The food is fairly typical cafeteria food, with a decidedly Asian twist. I'm working on collecting pictures of the various meals, so there will be a future post dedicated to cafeteria food. Sometimes, the food just doesn't look edible, so we will go out to lunch. Within walking distance of the school, there is a McDonald's, Pizza Hut, several random Korean restaurants, and lots of street food. There will probably be a future street food post too, now that I know what most of it is.

After lunch, I have two more classes to teach. One is at 1:20, and the other is at 2:45. Both of these classes are at the same level, and they are going through the same book, so I basically teach the same class back to back. In between these classes, I tend to have a lot of students in and out of my office with questions, or just wanting to practice their conversation skills.

After the last class is over, I have about an hour before I head home. I typically get all of my copies made for the next day's classes and finalize the details for my 8:00 and 9:00 classes, and make sure that my grade book and attendance books are all caught up from that day's work. I also tend to write many of my work-related emails during this time.

When 5:00 rolls around, I'm free to go, but I have had to stay late quite a few days this semester because the grading load is so heavy. By the time I do go home, the train going towards home is usually quite crowded again. I make it home, and I'm dead tired. I scrounge up some food for dinner, and spend the rest of the evening enjoying quiet pursuits. Sometimes I'll go out for dinner or coffee or whatever with friends. I go to Bible study once a week. But my life is pretty quiet.

That's the typical schedule. There really isn't much change from that. On Friday morning, I spend several hours reading English books and trying to make up lesson plans on the spot for 2-6 year old students. On Wednesday, I don't have my afternoon classes, so it is usually a day for meetings and catching up on grading/lesson planning. Saturday, I'm free to do what I want, but on Sunday morning I have to go back to my school and teach a class for elementary school students at the university church.

All in all, it's a glamorous life here in Seoul ;)

The Rooftop Garden

Some of my students playing an exciting game of "count and noncount noun go fish" on the rooftop garden, because the weather was too nice to have class inside today.

A little of this and that

After six weeks of radio silence, I'm back. It's been quite a full six weeks, complete with a whirlwind trip back to the States and the death of my grandmother. School started up last week, but we had level testing and sorting people into classes the first week, then a three day break this week, so tomorrow will be the first real day of classes. I'm excited to get to know a new set of students this semester. Our enrollment has grown by leaps and bounds since last semester, so I'll have nearly 50 students this semester. It's going to be pretty busy.

I spent the last day of my mini-vacation teaching one of my American guy friends how to make lasagna. This is something of a feat in Korea. We had to make our own ricotta cheese, pasta sauce and even noodles. It took almost 10 hours, all said and done. We also did some shopping in there (for things such as stock pots and LCD TVs for Foster's new apartment) and quite a bit of dish washing. It was a nice way to spend the day, complete with lots of laughter and good Italian food. The lasagna is safely tucked away in Foster's freezer for an important dinner party in two weekends.

I finished writing the syllabi for all of my classes tonight. It looks like it is going to be a busy semester, especially with 50 students. I changed the assignments around from the way I did it last semester, so hopefully that will help a little bit with the backlog of grading. It should be an adventure!

I have to teach a class in seven hours, and get to school early to get my syllabus printed for the first class. Hopefully I'll be able to connect well with my students, and tomorrow will go smoothly. I have pictures from the lasagna adventure today and some stuff from America that I'll hopefully get put up in the next day or so.

One other important announcement: Because of the recent time change in America, things have changed with the time zones. Here's the new key.

Eastern time: There is a 13 hour difference. Add 1 and swap the AM/PM.
Central time: There is a 14 hour difference. Add 2 and swap the AM/PM.
Mountain time: There is a 15 hour difference. Add 3 and swap the AM/PM.
Pacific time: There is a 16 hour difference. Add 4 and swap the AM/PM.

Intensives are finished!!

It's been a pretty crazy few weeks around here. I've been teaching another intensive class. The movies class was a for credit class that was only open to university students. The class that I just finished was supposed to be something similar to that. My school asked me to choose an American novel to teach in a two week class.

I thought about the various options I had, and decided that, all things considered, "To Kill a Mockingbird" would be a good choice. It is set at about a 9th grade reading level. I spent quite a bit of time trying to explain to three different people exactly what it would mean for me to teach a class about a novel. The students would have to have a high enough English level to read about 30 pages each night. Every person I tried to explain this to assured me that they understood, and that they wanted a class for high level students.

So. I prepped out this entire class. The first day of class, the administration managed to change my schedule and cancel one of my days of class because they had other KBU duties that they wanted me to participate in. So I scrambled around and reworked the class schedule. Apparently my class was quite popular, and quite a few students had tried to sign up for it. The school capped the class at 10 students, but at the beginning, there were definitely more than that who showed up. In all of the students, there wasn't one single student whose English was good enough to read even a single chapter of the book.

It was definitely an interesting two weeks. Each day I scrambled, trying to find some way that I could actually teach something that would be useful to my students. We never did actually read the book, but we watched the movie and had some good discussion about some of the main themes. I hope that my students learned something. It definitely stressed me out a lot though. Especially since I never knew who would show up. By the end of the class, there was only one student who showed up. It was actually fairly discouraging, but it is finished now. I have to teach one Sunday school lesson tomorrow, then I'm officially on vacation!!

Next week is the Lunar New Year, which is a big huge deal here in Asia. I'm not exactly sure what all the celebrations will entail, but all of my other Foreigner friends have time off from work, so we have some general revelries planned!

This afternoon, some of the guys from my church came over. Two of them are Texans, and they have been missing American style barbeque pretty badly. I made pork barbeque, corn bread, garlic carrots, creamed corn and chocolate chip cookies. And of course, the inevitable Southern sweet iced tea. We spent almost 5 hours sitting around laughing and talking. We all laughed so much that our faces hurt, but we also had some really serious conversations. I can't think of anything better than good food, good friends and good conversation to start off a vacation.

Next week I'm going to be catching up with friends I haven't been able to see much of because of my insane work schedule, and get ready to leave for China. It is pretty crazy to think that in one week, I'll be in yet another foreign country... It will be interesting to see if Korea feels like home when I come back to it after being away for three weeks.

Anyway. Hopefully I'll have time next week to catch up on some of the blog posts I've been meaning to write, but just not had words left for at the end of the day. And there will definitely be adventures to report from China!

Whew...

Midterms are done. Well, almost done. I still have to give the exam to my IT English students on Tuesday, but the exam has been written, copied and stapled AND the Monday review session is planned. All that remains to be done is the grading. That will be a bit of a nightmare, but it will be over soon enough. 

One of the good things is that I have some extra time off next week. ESWP did midterms a week ahead of the rest of the university to help the students out a little bit with the rest of their exams. So next week, in lieu of attending class every day, we are sponsoring "American Culture Week". What this means is on Tuesday and Thursday we are showing some movies with free popcorn and then doing a short activity after the movie. Students are required to come to one movie and that gets them marked as present for the whole week. We are showing "Up" and "The Terminal" and everyone is pretty excited about it!

As a result of this, I don't have to spend nearly as much time at work this week! I have to go in for an hour or so on Monday to do my IT English review session and for an hour on Friday morning to read books to my 4-6 year olds... But I don't have to go into work at all on Wednesday! Happy day!! My friend Renae and I are getting together at her house and having a baking fest! She has an oven, so we are going to go a little crazy! We have pizza or calzones, bread, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies on the menu! 

It will be really nice to have some extra time to get stuff done. I'll be able to go to the expat banking center and get some stuff set up, and go to the foreigner's district to buy a Korean book and some spices and such that I have been wanting. I can sleep in a little bit, and hopefully make it up to the mountain that is in my neighborhood. 

I'm also planning on posting a lot of pictures on here in the next week or so. I've been unsure about what to post on this blog, so I've been waiting until something special or interesting happened... Then I realized... I live in a foreign country. There are lots of things that are different enough to warrant being interesting. So, I'm going to try and take you on a photo tour of my immediate neighborhood. I'm starting to figure out where to go for different things, so I can show you "my" stores ;-) I also hope to get some pictures of my campus and classroom. I'm going to try to get better about giving more of an idea of what life is like here instead of waiting until something out of the ordinary happens!

As part of my attempts to make this blog a little more user-friendly, I have added a formspring to the right hand side of this page. You can basically ask questions on there, and I'll get them and do my best to answer them. They can be about information you want about Korea, teaching, me... Ask whatever you want, and I'll try to answer it!

Snippets from Week 1

Well, I survived the first week of school. It has been an absolutely INSANE week. We started classes on Monday, but by the time Monday rolled around, that was about all we knew. None of us in the English Speaking/Writing Program (hereafter known as ESWP) had a class schedule. So, we each sat in our respective office/classroom and waited for students to show up.

I sat and waited, and waited and waited. Around 10:30, the guy who is our English speaking contact with the rest of the university came in and told us that we had to go to the chapel service at noon to be introduced to the university. Students are required to go to chapel every day, but since the whole thing is in Korean, we are not required to attend. We were met near the chapel by the assistant dean of academic affairs, and he told us to follow him.

We were all pretty surprised when he opened a door and we walked onto the stage in front of the entire student body! We sat there, front and center, and listened to an awards ceremony in Korean for almost 45 minutes before we were introduced. Introductions consisted of the university president telling where we were from, what university we had attended and what our major was in Korean and then we were supposed to bow and go sit back down. By far the hardest part was trying to look interested in an awards ceremony that I couldn't understand for 45 minutes ;-)

My first class came in around 2:45. We had to do placement tests for every single student, so the first day was spent in having students write essays to introduce themselves and letting them ask questions. The most popular questions were:

• Where are you from?
• Do you have a boyfriend?
• Do you like Korean/spicy food?
• How long will you stay in Korea?
• What is your favorite thing about Korea?
• Do you want to marry a Korean man?

My next class came in at 4:10. They were my IT English students, and I really like them a lot! It turns out that I get along really well with people who are a little bit nerdy no matter where in the world we are ;-) I have six students in that class. There are four boys and two girls. They got the same round of essay writing/questioning too.

On Tuesday, we administered individual speaking tests and written grammar/idiom tests. Each essay, written exam and speaking test had to be graded and ranked by level by Wednesday at 1:00, so it was a pretty crazy time. We got all of our students ranked, then we had a meeting to sort them out by levels. We had figured out our schedules, more or less, by that point. On Wednesday, I had two advanced classes, one intermediate class and IT English. 

My 8:00 class is advanced and it has five students in it. Four of my students are Korean, and one of them is from Cambodia. I was most pleasantly surprised to discover that there are some international students at my university. Most of them are from Cambodia and mainland China. My 10:25 class only had two students in it, but I found out today that their class schedules had changed, so they are going to be taking an 8:00 class with a different teacher now.

My 2:45 class is my biggest, with ten students. They are all at an advanced level as well. There is one girl who spent a year and a half living in Canada, and she is very anxious to continue to practice her English. One of my students is from China, and he is pretty anxious to go back. The other eight students are from Korea, and most of them are nursing majors. The students who seem to be the most interested in learning English are the computer/technology majors, education majors and nursing majors. Almost all of my students fall into those groups. I have a few odd ones out who are social welfare students. 

I currently have an open class at 10:25 because of the two girls having to switch their time. I don't know what the university is going to put in that slot. I have heard rumors of a TOEIC (Test Of English for International Communication) speaking class. Who knows what will end up going there.

I also met my younger students for the first time today. I spent 90 minutes a week teaching short English classes to 4-6 year olds at the childhood learning center that is on campus. The kids are so adorable!! They are all a comical mixture of really excited and terribly shy. I think that I am the first foreigner that most of them have ever talked to.

I have six classes of kids for about 15 minutes each. Today we practiced introducing ourselves. I don't know how many hundreds of times I said "My name is Sarah. What is your name?" today. We also talked about age, family members and days of the week depending on how advanced the class was. After I was done teaching classes, the teachers at the center invited me to come to lunch with them. They were all really really sweet, and I liked them quite a lot! Most of them speak very little English, and I speak practically no Korean. It is amazing how much you can communicate using single words and wild hand movements. I think that I will be a master at charades after spending a year teaching English ;-)

The last bit of exciting news is that I was offered the chance to teach an additional class. It is part of the lifelong learning center affiliated with the university. I will be teaching a wide variety of ages/backgrounds/professions for one hour each week. The students are apparently all at a fairly basic level of English, and they just want the chance to do some interaction. Registration for that class isn't closed yet, but it will be somewhere around ten students. I'm excited to teach people who are seeking knowledge, and it is pretty nice because they are increasing my pay by a fairly significant amount for doing this!

Really the only other interesting thing that has happened is that Typhoon Kompasu passed over the general Seoul area on Thursday. Everyone was expecting it to be a pretty terrible storm, because contrary to the usual pattern, the storm strengthened between Okinawa, Japan and Korea. It hit much earlier than was predicted. The whole thing was over by about 10:00 in the morning. There were lots of trees that had been uprooted, and a few of them snapped in half. Lots of branches were down, and there were random signs and sheets of metal and plexiglass on the street. From what I've heard, there wasn't any significant damage and nobody was killed. Hopefully this means that the end of monsoon season is near! I'm getting pretty tired of the nearly constant rain!

I think that I'll stop now ;-) It has been a full week so I will spare you any more details ;-)