The End is the Beginning

Way back in the day when I was studying music history, I remember this little song. It is from the Medieval period, and it's called "Ma fin est mon commencement" which translates into "my end is my beginning". What made this song so unique was that it was a perfect mirror image, so it was like you listened to the first half of the song, then you listened to it backwards. It's a pretty cool little song -- check it out!

I kinda feel like that song right now. Things are winding down at KBU. I'm done teaching. My office is basically cleaned out. I have to make one more trip to drop off the keys to my apartment and print my plane ticket. It's been a rough year there. Hopefully we were able to help make things a little better, and it won't be that bad for the next group of people. Despite it all though, I did love my students.

KBU is a small school. I've had just over 10% of the total student body flow in and out of my classroom in the past year. Whenever I walk anywhere on campus, I see students that I know. Even the students I've never taught know me, and they generally try to speak some English. When I go to the cafeteria, there are students who will bring their lunch over and eat with me. I sometimes get texts or emails from students that are really sweet. I've definitely had a good group of kids this past year, and I will miss them a lot.

I'm moving to my new apartment in the morning, so I'm in the middle of packing and cleaning. I never thought I'd say it, but I've grown rather fond of my little shoebox apartment. It will be strange to come back from America to a new place. These four walls have seen a lot in the past year.

At the same time, I'm already gearing up for my new job when I get back. I've been getting a flurry of emails from my director, TAs and colleagues. I've had to learn how to navigate the online portal system that is entirely in Korean. I'm looking over textbooks and beginning to think about how I want to run my classroom.

I'm packing everything up, which reminds me of doing the exact same thing just about a year ago when I was preparing to come to Korea for the first time. It's so strange, because Korea is familiar now, and it's home. But when I come back, it will be to a new neighborhood and new job. I'll have to learn the finer points of public transportation all over again. I'll have to navigate a new set of office politics. Only it won't be as overwhelming as it was last year, because there is an underlying sense of familiarity to it.

So. In a few days, I'll fly back to America, and I'll spend time with friends and family, do a bit of road tripping, eat lots of good food and generally make merry. Then I'll get on a plane for a very long flight and come back to the Incheon International Airport. It will be a little bit of an end, and in all the same ways, it will be a little bit of a beginning.

Maybe I'll have more time to process the entirety of this year when I'm on the plane, or in America. Or maybe I won't. Because even though there are lots of ends and lots of beginnings, I'm still in the middle of this Korean adventure. But for now, I need to go finish packing so I can move to Haebangcheon in the morning.

A Note To My Fellow Teachers

I love so many things about teaching. I love that moment when a light bulb comes on for a student and you can see them understand a new concept. I love reading the notes that they write to me and hearing their stories. I love the opportunity to build relationships with people, and hopefully influence them in positive ways as they prepare for this crazy thing called life.

Yes, there are times I wish I didn't have quite so many lessons to plan, or quite so many essays to grade. Sometimes I think I'm going to be buried with a red ink pen firmly in my hand. I have problems with my school administration (which I understand goes with the job) and that sometimes interferes with my relationship with my students. But it's still worth it, because I love teaching.

All of the relational aspects of this job make teaching one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. But from time to time, something comes along and it just knocks the air out of me and leaves me unsure how to proceed. One of those things happened yesterday.

During the course of the day, a young woman came to my office. She seemed a little more shy than normal, but she came over to my desk and we started talking a little bit. After a few minutes, she told me that she was so excited, because over the weekend, she had made friends with a foreigner. She was so happy that this foreigner wanted to talk to her, even though her English is only middle level.

Of course, I think it is wonderful when students actually work to use English outside of the classroom, and I was happy for her. I started asking her questions about her new friend, and that's when I started to get that terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

This foreigner had found the young woman on facebook and tried to be friends with her. He then found her on a popular messenger service and started talking to her on there. She was having trouble understanding some of the messages, so she asked me to read them. This man was calling the young woman things like "dear", "cutie", and "honey". He was asking about her friends, and if she could introduce him to her friends. He wanted her to send pictures of herself and her friends. He was constantly asking her to call him so he could hear her voice. He was trying to get her to come to his apartment so he could cook her food from his home country. She came to me on a Tuesday, and he found her on facebook on Sunday.

I tried my best to explain to her why it was inappropriate for him to be calling her pet names, ask for pictures and introductions, and invite her to his apartment. I told her that she shouldn't talk to him anymore. I told her to come back and talk to me if he wouldn't leave her alone, and I would talk to him and make him understand. I told her that I would be happy to introduce her to other foreigners if she wanted to have some foreign friends. She seemed to understand everything I said, and she said that she wouldn't talk to him again.

This situation is so difficult. It seems like the culture between Korea and America is so different on this point. In America, I don't give my phone number to everyone I meet. I don't text people I don't know well. If someone friends me on facebook and I don't know them, I immediately ignore their request. It seems like people more readily give out their phone number and engage in relationships with people in Korea. It is normal for professors to put their cell phone number on the top of the syllabus. None of my students have ever abused that, but they do send me texts and call me when they have questions or need clarification. Maybe it has to do with individualism vs. collectivism, but I certainly don't understand any of that well enough to comment on it. What I do know for sure is that this was a terrible spot for this young woman to be put in, because she had absolutely no way of knowing that this man was trying to take advantage of her.

It is easy to complain about all of the strange things that happen to us as foreigners in Korea. I get really tired of the stares, the assumptions that I can't use chopsticks or I don't like spicy food. I often feel like I'm some sort of freak side show, rather than a real person with real thoughts and feelings. It's annoying and sometimes inconvenient for me. But there's a much more dangerous underside to this fetishization of the foreigner.

So many young people in Korea have grown up watching Western movies and TV shows. They see Western models on the subway ads. They listen to Western pop music. They get some very strange ideas about what Western culture is, and how it is supposed to work. They don't really understand how Western culture should work, which in normal circumstances would be more than ok. The vast majority of Westerners (myself included) don't really understand how Korean culture works. But every once in awhile, some creep comes along and preys on that cultural misunderstanding to try to  manipulate a situation to get what they want.

I know that lots of English teachers in Korea feel like they aren't "real" teachers. They feel like walking tape recorders, or a magician who is expected to conjure up games which a) entertain the kids, b) please the parents, and c) magically imbue English fluency. As we all know, every school in Korea is different. All of those things may be true for you. What I do know is, regardless of our lesson plan restrictions, we do have the opportunity to educate our students about other things.

Korea is rapidly becoming more multi-cultural. Yeah, it probably doesn't look like New York, London, Toronto or Sydney's multiculturalism. But it's coming. We have the opportunity to teach our students about our culture. About our interactions. About what is and isn't ok to read in text messages from a random businessman you've never met. We can equip our students with something more powerful than perfect English grammar. We can give them the tools to know when something isn't quite right with their interactions with a foreigner, and hopefully, we can help them realize that foreigners aren't all movie stars and don't all act like movie stars. Maybe, just maybe, we can teach our students to see past our small heads, big eyes and funny colored skin and see that we - the foreigners -- are no different from the Koreans. We are good and bad, selfish and selfless, and we need to be evaluated as people rather than a Hollywoodized phenomenon.

To my fellow teachers in Korea -- what do you think about all of this? How can we help our students learn the boundaries of culture so they can have some form of radar to detect creeps like this guy?

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.

Picture of the Day

I recently got some really cheap wall decals to hang in my classroom. I love finding things on sale! After I packed up all of my Christmas decorations a few months ago, my room just felt really bare. So I was happy to find these. There are two of them on the wall that my students look at, and one that is on the back wall that I see when I'm sitting at my desk. That one is by far my favorite! 

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!

I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal ;)

It's been a little crazy around here lately. Christmas was pretty low key. I managed to catch a whopper of a cold, so I slept through most of the holidays. I was teaching a winter intensive class at my university called American Culture in Film. We had about three hours each day for class, so I'd lecture for awhile to highlight the various aspects of American culture in the movie of the day and teach any necessary vocab or idiom, then we'd watch the movie and have some discussion at the end.

There were several interesting moments in this class. We watched quite a variety of movies, ranging from 1937 to 2009. Most of my students really liked the black and white films we watched. All of my female students agreed that Jimmy Stewart was pretty hot ;) It was a lot of fun to watch my students watch the movies. Most of the films they had never even heard of before, so it was all new to them. They were really excited about ET and The Wizard of Oz. I did a poll to see what their favorite movie was, and it was a tie between A Charlie Brown Christmas and The Shop Around the Corner. I definitely wasn't expecting either of those to top the list.

Prepping and teaching a 3 hour class every day was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It definitely took a lot of time, because I had to watch every single movie in advance to make notes and create a lesson out of it. Between being sick and teaching, things have been pretty boring around here lately.

The one big exciting thing happening is the plans for my trip to China are pretty much all made! I'll be leaving in 23 days for a three week tour of six cities in China. I'll get to see a lot of my Chinese friends from my Purdue days, which I'm pretty happy about! The one difficult thing will be packing. I'll be visiting the Northernmost province of China that borders Siberia, and end up in the Southernmost province of China that is very near Taiwan. Siberia is a frozen wasteland that is ridiculously cold. Taiwan is a tropical climate. I think that this trip will prove the wonderful value of layers ;)

And finally, to end this incredibly haphazard blog entry, I give you a strip from the ever-class Calvin and Hobbes.



From the Republic of Korea, I wish you a happy Friday (or Thursday, depending on when you read this)!!

IT English Class Party!

Several weeks ago, I decided to have my IT English students over to my apartment for an evening of American food and non-classroom English. The class is small, with only 6 students, so it worked out well.

I made beef stew, Southern style biscuits, grilled cheese and sweet iced tea. The students had never tried any of these foods. When we all walked into my apartment, they all decided that American food didn't smell anything like Korean food. I'm inclined to agree with them ;)

The stew was in the crock pot and didn't need much done to it. My students mixed up the biscuits while I started on the grilled cheese. All in all, they liked the food. All of the biscuits were gone. There was only one bowl of beef stew left for my lunch the next day. There was a little bit of confusion about the tea, because it was black tea instead of green tea, but most of them liked it pretty well. Katie, it should be noted that I made the tea my way rather than your way ;) I didn't want to scare them off.

This is Min. He was always smiling and happy. He is one of those guys who is always nicely dressed and innately knows how to be a gentleman. His English wasn't the highest level in the class, but he always worked really hard and was always brave enough to try to speak. 

This is John. The first time I met John, he spent quite a lot of energy trying to make me understand just how awesome Manchester United was. I definitely understood the words and sentences that he was using, but I don't think he ever quite convinced me that I should stay up until 4 am to watch the soccer games like he did. 

Grace is applying to study at an American university next year. She always had something to say about whatever our topic was. When I first met Grace, I thought that she was going to be one of those sweet and quiet students who pays attention but doesn't really talk. That wasn't quite how things turned out ;)

Janet didn't want to have her picture taken that night. She wasn't the most vocal student, but Janet is a thinker. She works really hard to make sure that she understands the big picture and all of the details. It was always fun to watch Janet read. She would get really into it, and underline and circle and chew on her ink pen. I could tell exactly when she was struggling and exactly when she understood what she was reading.

Min Seok was one of my oldest students. He has already finished his military service and he is actually graduating soon. He is in my intensive class now, and it is his very last college course. I don't know exactly what happened to cause him to make this particular face, but he is a sweet, happy-go-lucky guy most of the time ;)

Last, but not least, this is Oh. He has also finished his military service, will graduate soon, and is in my intensive class. At the beginning of the semester, Oh was the student who seemed the least motivated. But somewhere around the midterm, he started to work really hard and his English improved quite a lot. He is much more willing to speak now, and he wins the award for most improved student in this class. 

A Tale of a Dwarf Country and a Giant Country

Whew... It's been quite the week. Finals were last week, and it was pretty crazy. I had to administer a normal exam for my IT English class, but all of my other classes had to submit written portfolios and then come in for an individual interview. I also start teaching winter intensives tomorrow. For the next three weeks, for three hours a day, I'll be teaching about American culture in movies. It should be interesting, once I figure out how to pace a 3 hour class ;-)

In the tradition of all semesters, now that it is finished, I am sick. Hopefully I won't get too sick though. After all, the next term is starting! With my student's permission, I thought I'd share some of their writings that I particularly enjoyed over the next little bit. I haven't edited the grammar, content or spelling at all in these. This came from an assignment to write a fairy tale. Enjoy!

Once upon a time there was a dwarf country and a giant country. A serious climatic change occurred. It has caused a food crisis in the dwarf country. The prince of the dwarf country left for the giant country for borrowing some food. He walked and walked and run and rn. On his way he had lots of difficulties. Big birds and dogs attacked him. Also the weather was very cold and windy.

After 10 days, at last, he arrived at the giant country. He went into the giant's palace. When he entered the giant's palace he saw the giant princess. He fell in love with her when he saw her for the first time. But he couldn't express his feelings because he was a dwarf. He borrowed some food and went back to his country. But, as ever, his mind was full of the thinking about her. Everyday he longed for her.

He went to meet a witch in agony. He said to the witch. "I really love the giant princess but she is too big to be my girl. Please make her small like me." The witch said on thinking over "I can help you. but. I can only make her small. I can't make her big again. This is very important fact."

"Okay, no problem. I'll make her happy" the prince replied. In that night, the witch used magic and the giant princess changed into the dwarf. Next day, in the morning the princess screamed looking her body. She cry and cry all day long. She packed and left for the dwarf country quietly. She didn't want to show her appearance to anyone.

When she got near the dwarf country, she met the dwarf prince. The dwarf say her eyes filled with tears. He said, "Why you look so sad? What happen?" she told him everything that happened to her. The prince said, "I'm sorry to hear that. I want to help you. I'm a prince in this country. I'll give you chance to live in my palace." In that time, the princess had no time to think. She followed him.

The prince was very happy as if he got everything in the world. However, in the dwarf palace te princess never laugh. She always looked so sad. In every night, her cry came into the prince's hearing. He thought. He made a big mistake. He was very sorry to her.

Again he went to meet the witch. He said, "My thinking was so short. It's my fault. Please. Make her big again. I'll do anything you want me to do." The witch thought seriously and said, "There is only one way but if she get big, she won't never remember you and you will die. Do you want this way?" He said, "If it is only way to make her happy, I will die. It's... okay..." In the night, the witch used magic.

 The princess changed into a giant again and the prince vanished like smoke. The princess lives happily ever. nobody remember the dwarf prince and the princess's appearance when she changed into a dwarf.

-THE END-

My Classroom!

I've been working on decorating my classroom for Christmas with various odds and ends I've found around school/the city. I'm going to be really sad when January hits and I have to take all of it down again!

This is the view you get when you walk into my classroom. 

A closeup of my snowflakes and plants!

And the stockings. I was impressed with the fact that all of the English was culturally AND grammatically correct!

This is where all of that real work in the real world happens. 10 points if you can name that movie!!

This is where most of my students sit. I haven't figured out what to do on that back wall yet, but it is kinda depressing...

This is the wall opposite of the window. There are two cute little dogs that say "welcome" and a nameplate that says "Professor Sarah Fehrman, English Zone 4" but there were students studying just outside the door, so I didn't want to go take a picture. You'll just have to imagine!

Each month I make a giant calendar that has a bunch of crazy holidays. Sometimes I put serious ones, but most of them are silly. Like today! For those of you in North America, December 8th is National Brownie Day!

A Campus Tour

It was a beautiful day in South Korea today. It was really cold this morning, but the afternoon warmed up nicely and the sky was an incredibly vivid blue. There is this small garden on top of one of the buildings on my campus, so I went up to take some shots of the campus and surrounding mountains.

This is the name of the garden. But I don't think that is what they really meant.

That's more like it... Those pesky ls and rs....

This is the gazebo where I sometimes ate lunch when the weather was a little bit warmer. It is also in the roof garden. 

This is the garden. It isn't too pretty now, but based on the kinds of plans up there, it will be beautiful in the spring and early summer! The building with the green and white stripe is a hospital, and I think that most of the other buildings are apartments and offices.

This is looking down on the campus. This is the building that I teach in. 

The cool circle thing is the entrance to the student center and cafeteria. This is also the entrance to the all-important nap room and snack room!

My building again, and the computer building. 

These are all apartment buildings, and this is a mountain that you can see from campus. It is next to the mountain that I climbed a few weekends ago. I promise I'll get around to putting up pictures from that soon!

There is a little stream that runs adjacent to campus. There are walking paths on either side of it.

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!

Things I love about my students, part I

Consider this to be an on-going series of posts, whenever my students do something that is particularly newsworthy.

This post is actually a few weeks out of date, but I don't have a memory card reader on my computer at school, and I didn't have internet at home for a long time. Last month, Korea celebrated a holiday called Chuseok. I wrote about it a little bit here. Several of my students gave me small gifts for Chuseok.

One student gave me this lovely box.

Inside of it was a small teddy bear wearing hanbok, which is traditional Korean clothing. He now lives on my computer at work. 

She had also written me a really sweet note.

A few days ago, I walked into my classroom to discover that some of my students had drawn this picture on my whiteboard. I thought it was pretty great!

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 ;-)