Tuesday, June 21, 2011

New changes at work

It's now the 4th week of the new quarter and all the new changes that happened. Here are the new changes for us: we no longer have our own classroom, the lowest level to see the native teacher got new curriculum, and we now teach 27 (me) and 28 (Jeremy) classes (up from just 23 or 24 when we started). Though it seems like very few changes have occurred, they are fairly big changes. With no classrooms it means that we move to all the homeroom classes to teach and must tote around our things. Thankfully we have a USB drive as well as like a file folder to hold our books and papers. We are still trying to get into a routine of things, which we've pretty much done, but for some reason the classes are just getting harder to handle. The students seem to be more out of control than before, and with more classes than before, we just aren't able to stay sane for some of our days. On Mondays we have 6 classes in a row, but it's not bad because the students themselves aren't too bad. Wednesdays, Jeremy has 6 classes in a row plus one more. It's a very, very hard day for him. Fridays we both have 7 classes total, and Jeremy has 5 in a row. This day is extremely tough for me, and somewhat for Jeremy. We are now at the 2 month hump, and we can see the end in sight which is probably contributing to us having a harder time with work. We are just plugging along, counting down the days. Starting July 21 we will have summer intensives until August 19. Our time schedule will change: we will begin at 10 a.m. and end either at 7:40 or 8:20 p.m. We won't have extra classes like winter intensive, but we may have one extra class for 6th graders or 1st/2nd graders; we don't know yet. We, well at least me, are hoping that time will go by just a bit faster during the week so that we will be finished here. Here's to 2 more months.....

Insadong



 

Last Saturday we went to Insadong with our Korean instructors. Insadong is pretty much the center of Seoul and they want to keep tradition, so most shops sell traditional things and all shop names are in Korean (as you can see from the first picture of Starbucks). It was interesting to see all the traditional things sold, except for the fact that many of the things you can buy anywhere in Korea. After walking down the traditional street in the rain, we went to dinner. Our instructor wanted us to try a traditional, and boy was it traditional! There was tons of food that included whole fish, eyes and all. Of course, Jeremy and I didn't eat that or much of anything really. But the experience was fun. From there we headed to the King's Palace. It was the evening time so we didn't have much light left, but it was still pretty to see it in the dark. The palace is still as much the same now as it was when it was being used as the royal family's residence -up until the last century I think. The palace is huge so we didn't get to see it all. And the fact it was dark didn't help either. :) It was still a fun trip!