first day of teaching!

Hello all.

Today was my first day at school. First impressions? LOUD. Children are LOUD. Especially the wee little ones. And the 12/13 year olds. I nearly have no voice left.

Its really scary, we hardly get any training or preparation for teaching, we’re just thrown into the deep end. Minimal guidance, no introduction to what resources are available, just “here’s the class file, go and teach”. No-one even told me that all the teaching books came with teachers’ guides. And we have to come up with all our activities ourselves, and provide the resources for those activities ourselves.

First off I had a reading class with my E-6 Pride class (all the classes have names like pride, patience, happiness, etc etc). that was ok, I just read from the book, and then had an activity, and tried to stop them all from hitting each other violently. Then I had the same class for writing. Poor things, writing classes are very boring. Then I had the wee little kids, very gorgeous, but very difficult to keep on task. I had been very nervous about teaching, but it went relatively well. They all listened most of the time, and I didn’t have to send anyone out of the class-room for bad behaviour. Not bad for my first day! I have another class later on this evening.

Yale has 5 branches of schools, and I’m teaching at two of them. 4 days a week I’m at Bomo school, and then the two other days I’m at the main school. Bomo has 5 foreign teachers and about 7 Korean teachers, while Main school, surprisingly enough, has about 15 foreign teachers and many many Korean teachers. Its a real pain in the ass teaching at two schools, I have to lug all my resources between the two.

Hmmm, other news……

Ana, Tynessa and I went on a shopping spree at Wal-mart, we were there for over 3 hours. I’d forgotten how much crap you need to buy when you first move somewhere: cleaning products, food basics like oil, sauces, pasta…. Thankfully Ana’s boyfriend Eric came to pick us up so we didn’t need to taxi home. Taxi’s are ridiculously cheap over here, and that’s because you risk your life every time you climb in one. For those of you wise in the ways of Harry Potter, you’ll recall that magic bus that could squeeze itself into the shape of the space it needed to fit into? Well my taxi driver today clearly had that in mind, there were several times where I thought I was toast

Oooh, another “crazy Korea’ thing. I had to go to Jisan today to fetch my passport photos from the big department store. The store opened at 10.30am but I got there early, just in time to see all the store employees doing their exercises! Hand and leg shaking exercises, foot-tapping exercises, the whole shebang. It was so funny!