Holy Moly

I have not yet completed an entire week of teaching and I already feel as though I have been at this for weeks. A student was absent yesterday and I actually thought he was gone for days and made a big stink about him finally coming back today. Chalk it up to just another weird thing their slightly eccentric American teacher does.

This week has been one of the busiest, craziest, tiring, and most rewarding weeks I think I have ever had. Take a trip with me, friends into this wild world in which I live. I find myself in an elevator at 7:45 in the am listening to a Korean woman saying things I do not understand in a very high-pitched voice that rises and falls a lot more than one would think necessary for saying floor numbers. Once out into the big old world known as Seoul I walk to the bus, dodging cars left and right; the drivers here sure are different than they are in Vermont. The extremely crowded bus ride (where each time I am the only Caucasian....amazing) is about a half hour to the school, and luckily they repeat the names of the stops in English. I get dropped off by a McDonald's (they deliver. On mopeds.) and walk through a maze of apartment buildings to Canada International School, my mecca.

Once inside, there is a room full of cubbies to hold shoes as outdoor shoes are not worn indoors, which means I get to wear extremely comfy sandles all day. On Monday I arrived at 8:30am (school starts at 9:50am), got introduced, and given a quick run-down. I got the class schedule about 15 minutes before the students arrived, which is around 9:45. My classroom was BLEAK as the school was just flooded in a big landslide and everything had to be taken off of the walls to clean it up/do construction during their week of summer vacation.

I won't go into more detail about it all, but I will say that the expression 'fly by the seat of your pants' has taken on a whole new meaning for me. If this was a school in America, this shit would never fly, but as this is a private school in Korea all this lack of preparedness is not too much of a big deal. There are no standards to meet, no Adequate Yearly Progress, no tests (besides spelling), no grade books, no class lists. It's WILD. Basically we are expected to get through the books and workbooks, which is easy to fumble your way through if you happen to have no idea what the hell is going on. The parents like to see the books completely filled out and checked by the teacher, and if that occurs, everyone is happy. Our part, as committed American teachers, is to supplement this rote way of learning with fun activities, art projects, and games.

One amazing thing is that I teach all subjects, though it ends up being to three different groups of kids. I have a Kindergarten (Kindy) class M-F from 9:50 - 2:50, and two different second grade classes from 3 - 5:50pm, and those alternate M/W/F and T/Th. The funny thing about the Kindy class is that they are actually the age of American second graders...kind of. When a Korean is born they are automatically a year old so when I ask kids their age they say 'American or Korean?' It still doesn't make sense to me, but it's just another one to add to that long list of things that confuse me.

The days are long and exhausting, though some of that is due to still being jet-lagged. (Right now it's 9:40pm here and 8:40am at home.) Every other time I have taught I would go home around 3pm with the kids but now I am staying for another three hours, which is tough to get used to. I almost fell asleep standing up on the bus on the way home.

A lot of what was missing from my life in Burlington was all of this: working hard doing something I love. Nothing motivates me more than a classroom full of little kids, especially little Korean ones who love to learn, sing songs, listen to fairy tales, color pictures, and get excited with me about things other grown-ups would call silly.

More to come another time, friends. Thanks again for reading.