Final Exams

This week was the end of our Spring II session. We had our final exams this week. One of the disadvantages to working at a good School as opposed to one of the many crappy private schools (Hog wons) here in Korea is the amount of extra work I have to do compared to many of the teachers in Gumi. Most of the English schools here just do a minimum amount of work with the students, there are a lot of games and handing out worksheets and puzzles and that kind of stuff. However there are a few reputable schools and mine happens to be one of them. As a actual teacher I find this comforting because I do actually like teaching the kids English. But the downside to this is that I have a lot of extra work to do. Normally we give the students a test or essay every week which I have to grade, this is not normal most English teachers don't give or grade papers. We also design our own curriculum, I don't have to do all my classes but I have a fair share of all the classes we teach, there are 9 foreigners at my school so I design 1/9 of the curriculum. This is a lot more work than many of the other teachers in Gumi do, but I like the fact that my school isn't a joke. That said, I hate finals week. We have to design the tests, 2-3 for each of us. Then we have to administer the tests which is the easy part, but I have 100-120 students during the week, so I have to Grade 120 final exams, half of them long essays in 2 days, then tally the scores, also the session scores, quizzes homework, participation, etc. Then add all that up give them a grade, write a paragraph comment on each student, enter their scores in the computer, than handwrite them on their report cards( I don't know why this isn't electronic, but it isn't). I also have to write a review of each of our books. needless to say this isn't a fun week.

My only salvation is that I am leaving in just a little over 7 hours to go to the Mud Festival, its a party that draws around 1 million people to a resort town in Korea where they have a mud party, everyone gets all muddy and drinks excessively. It's gonna be awesome. I will write about it in my next blog.

The First 10 days

Well I have been here over 10 days now, the time has flown bye. The first few days of school were hard. I was jet lagged and there were a lot of new procedures and policies to learn. Teaching has been a challenge so far, but most of the students have a good basic understanding of English so it has been manageable. I teach writing and speaking/listening classes. The school is like an office building in the US, it has around 10 classrooms that vary in size but the largest will hold maybe 15 kids. I am going to try and figure out how to add pics to this blog soon, so you may be able to see what I'm talking about. My biggest complaint to date is that they don't turn on the air conditioning until people complain, but at least we have air and when it gets real hot they will have it on all the time. The kids are just like kids in the US, some are nice others are rotten. In general they seem more respectful of teachers than in the US but there are exceptions. I think I have been received fairly well by them, they seem to listen and do what I say most of the time. They listen more than the Special Ed kids I worked with in the US for sure. The curriculum that we use is fairly straight forward and with a few exceptions the text books are pretty easy to teach and straight forward for the kids to follow. I am glad that I signed on with a school that has a set curriculum and lesson plans, I would not be happy if I had to create my own right now. The school is in the middle of a commercial section of town, their are hundreds of stores,restaurants,schools,churches and Bars(called Hofs) within a 10 minute walk from the school. There are not any American chains within walking distance but there is a McDonald's and a Pizza Hut within a 5 minute cab ride.(I haven't been to either yet) There is a Lotteria (pronounced La Teria, I probably spelled it wrong but that's close),a Korean version of McDonald's about 100 feet away and also my 2 favorite restaurants to date, Suk Bong and a Korean Sushi Place with a name that's in Korean which I don't know and couldn't spell even if I did. The Suk Bong is a sandwich shop which makes egg sandwiches, its two pieces of toasted white bread, scrambled egg, cheese and toppings of your choice with a sweet sauce and hot sauce, its delicious. The Korean Sushi place makes Sushi Rolls, only there larger and contain cooked meats and fish instead of raw meats. It's not actually sushi but that's how we foreigners refer to it. Besides teaching I have gone out to several restaurants and Hofs. I went to VIP's an American style buffet place that's in downtown Gumi, its a lot fancier than a buffet place in the US, think Olive Garden Quality in a buffet and that should give you an idea, not great but sufficient. I also have been to a Korean Sashimi restaurant twice now, this does serve actual raw fish, its real Sashimi. I went to a place that they give you meat and you cook it yourself on flat top grills built into your table, since I'm an ovo/lacto/pesco(eggs,milk,fish in Latin) vegetarian I didn't eat the meat, but I was there and I got a veggie soup. Yesterday was a national holiday here in Korea, it was Buddha's Birthday, so we had the day off. 3 of my fellow teachers and I went to Daegu(the capital of the province I'm in) It's a large city with over a million people, its about a 25 minute train ride or drive away. We saw a Baseball Game, the Samsung Lions (my provinces team) verse SK(not sure what it means), the Lions won in a slug fest 9-6. Then we went to a commercial electronics store street that has around 50 electronics store next to each other, I bought an Olympus Digital Camera, it was about $80 dollars cheaper than in the US I figure and it included a free case, 1 gigabyte memory card and 2 batteries. I would say I saved around $125 US in total buying the camera in Korea. After that we went to Subway for subs and then to the movies to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The movie was the same cost as the US and subway was like $1 more expensive. The Baseball game was $8 for good seats and beers were only $2 per can and they give you the can unopened, which in Cleveland, where I'm from would mean that opposing players and bad officials would probably be stoned to death by full cans of beer, but Koreans are less violent than pissed off clevelanders.