So our first day at our school was last Monday, the day after we arrived in Korea. No time to recover from jet-lag, we were just thrown right into the swing of things! We had a little informational session, and then the rest of the day was observation. The vibe at the school is really great. Right now, there are three other English teachers besides us, and they are really nice. The branch manager, Sue, is great too. The teachers are treated really well. The school has a strict curriculum and syllabus, but it's also really laid back at the same time. Teachers get a lot of freedom with how they want to present the required curriculum. The class sizes range anywhere from 3-14 kids, which is really nice. I mostly have 3rd-6th graders throughout my 5 classes (which are organized by English level), and Tim has 2nd-8th graders. It's a private English school, so the kids come to our school for more English lessons after their public school is over. Yes, they are very serious about their English here! Right now the kids are on summer break, meaning they take more classes at our school. Which means that we will be teaching overtime for the month of August! Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'll work 10-8, with a 3 hour break, and Tuesday, Thursday, we'll work 10-10, with a 3 hour break! Pretty intense! But we get paid for our overtime hours, so it will pay off in the end. Plus, when we get to September and have our normal 2-10 hours, it will seem like a vacation!! So we are looking forward to that. Our first teaching experience at our school came on Tuesday morning, and it went really well. We were both kind of nervous, but we really liked it. The kids are so smart! My class was really quiet, so I found myself using up all my energy to get them excited. We do reading, reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary with the kids every class. We have to assign a lot of homework, which is kind of against what I believe in. But the kids are used to it, and they freak out if we forget to assign homework for a certain subject. They are really hard workers here. But Tim and I both really enjoy the teaching and the kids, so we know that we will have a fun year!
Culture
We love the Korean culture!! My favorite thing is the bowing! When you enter E-Mart, there is a person who's job it is to bow to you when you enter. It's so great! I also really like that the women walk around with umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun. It makes them seem so sophisticated and dainty. I want to try to start the umbrella thing back in America. Not sure if I can get it to catch on, but I want to try! I love the fashion here! The women are so beautiful, and they wear lots of flowy dresses with leggings and ornate high-heeled shoes! Tim noticed that when people hand things to you here (like money), they use two hands instead of one. It makes the action seem really deliberate and respectful. Another thing that we learned is that parking here is crazy. You can literally pretty much park anywhere you want to. We've seen cars parked on sidewalks, pedestrian walkways, in the middle of the road... it's crazy. Most of all, we've found the Korean people to be so helpful and friendly. People are always willing to help us when we don't understand something. And it's a really humbling feeling to have to ask for help, or to have to point to a picture because you don't know how to say the word in Korean. But we have always felt taken care of. One time when we were lost, we went to a gas station, and the guy there printed us out a map to get us where we needed to go. Countless times, we have found that the people here go above and beyond to help us out in any way they can. We are so grateful for this.
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