Busan, Seoul, Misc Updates

Busan was fun. I reunited with some friends from orientation and stayed with a friend on Yong-do Island. We spent a lot of time walking around, navigating the city, taking the subway from place to place, window shopping at a couple (massive) department stores, and checking out the beach at night. The weather was overcast & rainy during the day, so we couldn't fully experience the Busan beaches. However, Gwangalli Beach was gorgeous because it is in the shape of a huge half-circle and offers a nice view of the Diamond Bridge --lit up and everything-- and of the rest of the city twinkling around the shore. I want to return in a few weeks to attend the Busan International Fireworks Festival.

Busan at night

Overlooking the city in Seomyeong

Hello Kitty donut at Krispy Kreme yummm

View from Yongdo Island

This past weekend, I took a 4 hour bus up to Seoul to meet up with more friends from orientation. I traveled with one of my Mokpo buddies, Joanne.

Teaching is getting somewhat easier, but no less redundant. I teach my lessons 7 times: once for each grade and slightly harder as I go up from K-6. I have been teaching the alphabet & phonics for the second straight week and playing the same ABC Timebomb game over and over and over. I can hear the difference in the kids' pronunciation, which is reassuring, so hopefully I can move on by the start of next week.

Kindergarden sucks. I think the kids fall into a deep food coma or forget to take their A.D.D. meds before my 12:45pm class. Some of them have no attention span whatsoever. After two minutes, their heads are already on the desk or they're standing by their chairs (instead of sitting) or they're sitting in their chairs facing any and all directions but mine. What in the world is going through their minds????

I tried a different approach today and gave the kids a chance to stand up and interact rather than sit down for 30 minutes. I struggled to get the kids to stand in a circle. My translator didn't even get up to help me. She eventually convinced them to hold hands and that got them into a reasonable arrangement. Then I tried to explain that I wanted each kid to say one letter of the alphabet and go around the circle. My other grades figured it out, but kindergarten was a disaster. Before we were half way through the alphabet, the kids were pulling each others hands and falling on the floor. Then all of the kids started singing every letter of the alphabet in unison, which wasn't the point of the game at all. Meanwhile, my translator was still sitting there. The situation was ridiculous, and she wasn't even laughing. I think she was bored. I struggled to get the kids to start over, but they were lost, so I told them to sit down. I ended up doing the same exact PowerPoint presentation that I did for them yesterday, which was a drill on the letters A-J. For my closing activity, I put magnetic letters A-J on the board (in alphabetical order -- easy right?), split them into two teams, and called on two volunteers to slap the letter than I called out with a paper paddle. I first called the letter A. Neither of the kids could figure it out right away. Then I would have them recite the letter and the sound that it makes. I rotated kids and proceeded through the letter J (still in alphabetical order), and nobody caught onto the pattern. I think we're going to be doing the alphabet forever.....

With that said, kindergarten makes teaching the other kids seem easy. In all of my other classes, the kids get really excited, want to play my games several times, and shoot their hands up for a chance to recite the vocabulary every time I introduce a new word. I have also been drilling them with the alphabet and phonics, but I have been able to pinpoint their weaknesses and fine-tune their pronunciation: "L" vs "R"; "C" vs "G" vs "Z"; turning "epuh" into "F" and "A-chee" into "H." It's so redundant, but I can hear the kids getting better by the end of class.

Playing games with my 5th graders

I improvised a game where they could sit down because they were all over the place.

This also kept the noise level down (not really).

The weather is getting a bit chillier. As they would say on Game of Thrones, "Winter is coming."

I need to buy a multi-plug powerstrip because I can't watch my television without unplugging my refrigerator, something that I can only do for 30-60 minutes at a time. I have dozens of channels. Most are in Korean, and I probably wouldn't watch any of them even if they were in English. I don't find any of the variety shows the least bit entertaining. There are some stations that play American movies at night -- boring. And then there is CNN, which is the only station worth watching or listening to at any time of the day. The sound of an intellectual, fluent conversation in English stimulates all of the unused vocabulary in my brain. I'm growing a bit weary of thinking in and of ways to explain myself in broken, caveman English.

Tonight, I made an egg & kimchi sandwich. I made an omelet with kimchi and chopped garlic stems, then put that in a roll with more fresh kimchi. It was okay, but sounded better in theory that it did in practice. The kimchi omelet could do without the bread (and likewise).