Thursday, September 2, 2010

Korea Day 4

I moved into my apartment today. Jeff picked me up from the motel and helped me move all my stuff. I'm so happy it has an elevator. I got everything moved and settled in a bit, but there's still more I want to do. There are so many things to get used to. How to deal with the trash, how to pay with bills, etc. Still so much to learn.


Today was my first day teaching and there are a few things I noticed.

I really need to do the workbooks before I expect the kids to. For the most part, my books didn't have answers written in them but I figured that would be okay since it was basic English. No. When I'm doing 13 things at once it's hard to pay attention to the story and try to take attendance and make sure everyone understands what's going on, etc. Someone would ask me what a word meant and I wouldn't know where they were in the story or there would be a problem but I didn't know how the book wanted the students to answer. There was one point when I even told the kids to do a problem the wrong way and they knew I was telling them wrong. They laughed at me. I felt so dumb.

Some of the words are difficult to explain. For example, I had to define the word mineral. I know what a mineral is, but it's kind of hard to describe to smaller kids. A little one named Joseph whom I adore looked it up in his dictionary and showed me what it meant. Again, I felt so dumb.

I think the funniest part of my day happened outside of the classroom. I wanted to make a nametag for my desk, so I got a piece of paper and wrote my name in red and put some stickers on it. Julie, the teacher who sits next to me, said that it's not good to write my name in red. I didn't know what she was talking about and then I suddenly remembered reading that in Korea, you only write the name of dead people in red. She told me that was right so she flipped the paper over and told me to write the name again, which I did.

And now, a few pictures of magnificent Busan so far.



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