High School Musical

7 am wake up today, which is better than 5 am! Still, I could do with a longer sleep in, because after standing on your feet for six hours, you get pretty tired. I was very lazy today, unfortunatley. Bad Michelle! I basically spent the morning watching High School Musical 2 & 3. I also brought along the first book in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth Series, “Wizard’s First Rule”, which is just an excellent piece of literature. I’m about a sixth of the way through, and it’s delightful reading. But I digress.

I was supposed to go to the Lotte Super (remember, that’s the grocery store), but like I said, I was lazy, so I just stayed in and watched movies all morning. The pork I bought on Saturday was expired – only by one day, though – so I cooked it up in my brand new frying pan! Except I didn’t have anything to eat it with, so I slathered margarine on bread and made a quasi-sandwich. Healthy? No. Delicious? Heck yes.

This brings us to 2 pm, work time – time really flies when you aren’t doin much! Sasha helped me buy “bulgogi” on the way to work, which is basically thin slivers of beef in sauce. It’s kind of like the beef you get at the Teriyaki place on campus, and it’s really good. There was also kimchi – the first kimchi I’ve ever tried! It’s... interesting. I’m not a fan of spicy or cabbage, but together they’re not terrible. Apparently I will start off hating kimchi, but by the end of the year I will be in love with it. I really doubt that, but we’ll see what happens.

Classes only start at 4:30, so we have about two hours to plan lessons, or just fritter our time away if there’s nothing else to do. Sasha and Sean usually start off the day with lunch, so that’s what we did. I think the idea is that, so long as we’re in the building and teach the classes properly, we can basically do what we want. Similarly, our end time is technically 10:30 pm, but classes end at 10 pm so we just peace out after that.

Today I was told that I was going to teach Sean’s first class, which is a “JA” class. This means elementary school, kind of middle of the road English ability. The lesson was “Victimless Crimes” – yes, actually – and one of the topics was “Assisted Suicide”. Considering that these are 10 year olds learning this topic, it seems a bit serious for a lesson. But that’s what the unit was, so that’s what I taught.

It went alright. Sean had to step in a lot to help me out, but I think that’s reasonable, considering I’ve never taught anything before, like, ever. He explained that I have to “explain the shit out of everything”, because if I don’t, A) they won’t understand, and B) the lesson will go by way too fast. Asking the kids questions is also really good. So if the topic is, say, foreign food, you would ask them, “Do you have McDonald’s in Korea? What’s the Korean equivalent? Do you like hamburgers?”, etc. Sean also says that jokes are good, but I was never really the class clown, so hopefully they’ll survive without being constantly in stitches over my hilarious wit.

I watched two more lessons, and then we breaked for dinner. That’s at 7 pm, and it’s 20 minutes, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it isn’t all that bad. If you think about it, you’re not really working that hard until 4:30, so it’s only 2 and a half hours until break. And then another 2 and a half hours after dinner. Although I’ve been assured that once I actually start teaching, I’m going to be absolutely exhausted by 7. Sigh. And the structure is basically elementary before 7, and middle school after 7.

I watched Jenna’s lesson for a bit, then went with Yung Sun, the secretary/teacher who helped me out on Monday with my medical test thing, to get some pictures taken for my ARC (Alien Residency Card). Unfortunately the photo place wasn’t open, but I had a lovely chat with Yung Sun, who is in second year university, just started working at Avalon, and is really nice. She wrote me a sticky note that I will bring in to the photo place today, which will tell them what to do. That way I won’t have to try and mime “2 photos, 35 mm by 45 mm, please”. How do you even mime that? Insanity.

Then back to school for the last two lessons. The latter one was with Sasha, who was teaching MO, the highest level you can get. These kids are crazy smart. They have to learn 160 new vocab words each WEEK. 160. I couldn’t do that if I tried. And I speak the language! Sheesh. And they basically spend their class listening to recordings of lectures that are spoken abnormally quickly, and then answer really difficult questions about the passages. They’re kind of the AP class, although the interesting part was that although their understanding of English is obviously really good, they don’t speak it all that well. Or maybe they just lack confidence? Either way, it was a fun class. The two lectures were on glass making and sci fi movies vs. books, the latter of which was really interesting. Big surprise: movies are less detailed than books.

Walked home with Sasha and Sean, and then watched Cinderella Story before going to bed. The school has really good internet, so I streamed a bunch of shows as well as the movie, which I will watch tomorrow. My reasoning was that if I stayed up late, I would wake up later, and therefore be more well rested for work. Hopefully it turns out! Oh, and I bought a cherry coke, which was not that good, and made me kind of sick, so that’s going on my ixnay list.