Back to work…

After nearly six weeks of not doing really doing much outside of winter camp, I just finished up my first week of school after break.  It wasn’t even a full week either, because on Monday the kids just popped in for a couple of hours to drop off their homework before running home again.  Of course, I’m not going to complain about a four day work week any time soon though.

Being back in school, even if its only for a couple of days, means that I have to work myself back into a routine.  So far, so good.  I’ve completed a lot more work in the past week then I think I bothered to do in the first five months I was teaching here… but I’m not sure if that something I should be proud of.  I did spend a good seven hours on creating one activity this week which I’ll be using for a full three grades worth of classes.  It’s something that I’m actually relatively proud of too.

It started because I needed to come up with an activity for my 4th graders, who had spent the last weeks prior to vacation learning, “How much is it?”  I took that idea and made an auction game out of it.  I divided it the items into four categories they could bid on: food, transportation, houses, and famous friends.  To reduce the shouting and other craziness that would’ve ensued, we gave each time a mini white board and a marker to write their bid on.  They all held their boards up at the same time, said their numbers, and the highest won the prize.

Matt Reviews “The Chaser” and Winter Camp Notes

(Good news everyone!  This movie is listed on mysoju.com, so you can watch it for free there!  Click here to begin…)

Time for Vol. 2 of “Matt Reviews Korean Movies.”  This week, as recommended by the lovely Seung Hee,  I ended up watching “The Chaser (추격자/Chugyeogja).”  Now this movie was a lot more to my liking.  What we have here is your standard crime thriller with a distinctive Korean twist.

Joong-ho was a cop before he was fired for… let’s call them “extracurricular activities.”  He now works as a pimp for one of the hundreds of call-girl services in Korea.  Lately, a few girls have been going out on calls and not coming back.  As any responsible manager would do, he sets out to find exactly what’s been happening to his girls.

Through the course of his investigation, he discovers that all of the girls have disappeared after going to meet a certain man.  All he has is a phone number.  But it’s a phone number that he just sent a girl (Mi-jin) to…

Winter Camp

I’m about to finish up my second week of winter camp here.  It’s a nice mix of frustration and great times.  The way that it’s been set up is that I get a group of students from a one of the grades, regardless of level.  On top of that, because I didn’t know the students who signed up until about two days before camp started, there was no real way to make the perfect lesson plan for their level.  The problem with all the classes is that it doesn’t matter if they’re fluent in English or get confused when you say “Hello,” because they’re going to be lumped into the class together.  They’re all in 4th grade, what does it matter?

Well, it matters a lot actually.  What I ended up doing was just kind of making a general plan for the each week of camp, and then telling myself that I’m going to have to have a lot of backup plans depending on what level of students I end up with.  Now I can hear some teachers back home saying, “Wait, you don’t know the levels of your students?  You don’t know their names?”

No, no I don’t.  There’s 600 of these little buggers.  It’s a little tough to really memorize names in a class of 35.  Especially when you only see them once a week.  But I think that’s one of my favorite things about camp so far, is that I can actually take a little bit more time with each student and get to know them.  It’s been a pretty good time so far.

Matt Reviews “Take Off (Gukgadaepyo)”

So I’ve decided to start-up a new feature which will hopefully keep me more interested in writing on here.  As most of you know, I love movies.  I’m also a big fan of foreign films.  So today, while Seung Hee and I were sitting around trying to find something to watch on TV, it dawned on me… why don’t we watch a Korean movie?  There’s a rental store a stone’s throw from where I live, so we walked on over there and picked up “Take Off,” which is about the Korean ski jump team that participated in the Nagano Olympics in 98.  This turned into a pretty big hit in Korea last year while it was out and I was pretty ticked off that I missed it when it was in theaters.

Turns out that I was lucky I saved the 6 bucks or so extra that I would’ve paid in the theater.  This is a movie made for Koreans, by Koreans.  It’s like a Korean watching “Miracle.”  It’s just not going to have the same significance to them.  Well… there’s also just so many just baffling decisions made by the director here that unless you’ve got the built-in national pride flowing through your veins, the movie will lose you and lose you fast.  Now I’m sure I really don’t need to do this because the likelyhood of anyone back home seeing this movie is slim at best, but:

SPOILER ALERT!  SPOILER ALERT!  SPOILER ALERT!

Random thoughts from the cold…

• It’s not particularly hard to describe a Korean winter.  Two words: cold, dry.  That’s all you really need.  But that really doesn’t do it justice.  This is by far the coldest place that I’ve ever lived.  I describe a Korean Winter as “curse inducing.”  It’s the type of cold where you walk outside and the first thing that runs through your head is “_____ it’s cold.”
• The trick with this weather is that it doesn’t warm up.  It’s been at least 3 weeks now of around 20 degree temperatures, and honestly it might be longer than that.  It’s been sunny lately, but that really hasn’t provided much in the way of heat.  Now supposedly it might get up to freezing on Sunday, which I admit sounds nice.  But we’ll see…
• Of course, today I decided to walk a good half a mile home from the store, after stopping to see if I could pick up a decent standard ping pong paddle.  That meant that my cheeks were a little past rosy by the time I got home.  Really didn’t think I could turn purple that fast, but you learn something new everyday.
• Surprisingly, I couldn’t find a basic double sided paddle unless I wanted to spend at least a good $30 bucks.  I generally like my kids, but like hell if spending $30 on a paddle that I’m only using for a winter camp activity tomorrow.
• My winter camp has been rather hit or miss.  There’s no co-teacher in the class, which raises the difficulty level slightly.  It’s pretty difficult to teach kids how to talk about movies and music when you realize that they don’t understand you when you say, “This is easy.”  About then you just scrap a lot of the interesting things you were going to do and go with really basic games and sentences.  I’m generally happy if I get “I like _______” from these kids.
• Also, it still blows my mind that I had one class who didn’t laugh at the Pixar shorts I showed them today.  I’ve never met a single person who’s watched those and not laughed.  Unless they’ve seen them 100 times or something, I’m just stunned.
• Getting back to teaching has reminded me of a couple of things.  One, my kids level’s are so much lower than I remembered, or planned for.  I unfortunately broke one of the cardinal rules of lesson planning by forgetting the level of my students.
• It’s been a good month since I last had to teach, and in that month I got healthy again.  I had been fighting a cold for the last month or so of teaching, which ended with me completely losing my voice for a couple of days.  So it makes perfect sense that I seem to re-caught my cold in the week and a half that I’ve been back.

More later…

Chaos update…

The skies and roads are clearing… sort of.   The roads are because of the sheer amount of people that have been driving over them along with some fortuitous sunshine, so where’s it not one giant snowpacked lane you can start to see the black on the pavement.  Chances are it’s all black ice, but beggars can’t be choosers here.  They’re not exactly prepared for snow on this level.  Word is the last time this happened was 70 years ago, so there you go.

Now for a little quiz… what method of removing snow has been the most effective:

Or…

Funnily enough, it is the man with the shovel.  Except those men are typically the 60+ year old security/doorman that work at most of the big buildings around here.  They’ve done most of the work so far.  They are the reason that there are paths in the snow at the moment, because hardly anything else has melted yet.

But let’s not count out the snowplows though… I finally saw them out today… three days after it started snowing.  Er… Guys, I think you’re doing it wrong.  Half the time, there was nothing to plow, and the other half the snow was so packed down that the plow just bounced over it.  So right idea there guys, but terrible, terrible timing…

Snow + Korea = Chaos…

AND IT'S AWESOME!

Yep, guess it’s time to make the normal apology for not posting anything new lately.  Can’t say I’ve been busy, but I’ve been… well lazy to be honest.  Shouldn’t have been too unexpected.

So moving on to more important matters… Today was the first day of having to be back at work.  Now notice I didn’t say I had to work, I just had to be back at work.  There’s a great clause in the GEPIK contract that effectively states that even if there are no classes to teach that day, I have to be here.  Actual classes don’t start for another month.  I do have my winter camp starting next week, but I’m about 80% done with that at the moment.

As to be expected, after a nice two week vacation spent snowboarding, sleeping in, and generally being warm and comfortable in my bed, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to heading back to the school today.  Little did I know there was a special surprise for me when I woke up…

A good 3 inches of freshly-fallen-white-powder-make-you-homesick-for-Colorado snow.  Coating everything.  Now one difference between snow here and snow at home is it’s very easy to tell when the snow fell overnight at home, because the sun’s reflection makes your room unnaturally bright.  Here, I was kind of bitching to myself about it still being darkish outside at 8am.  Then I saw the snow, and that lifted the old spirits a good hundred-fold.

Winter and the school…

Halloween was a blast.  There are a ton of pictures around facebook of that absolute craziness, so hop on over there to check them out.  I might try to put them on here if I have the time, but it’s just so much easier to upload them there.

There was one negative about Halloween though, and that was the rain.  Midday, it decided for some reason that it was going to drop monsoon style rains on us, but since it’s October it had to be the cold kind of rain.  Made for cold night… and quite possibly heralds the return of winter around here.

Now the teacher’s around here make a lot of fun of the crazy things that have worked into Korean culture.  There’s the new one that says if you sleep with a foreigner, then you will catch AIDS.  That one’s a little extreme, but most of them are just funny.  Which leads to a Halloween costume like this:

This would be the Korean phenomenon known as “Fan Death.”  There used to be a belief (I say used to even though it might still be around in places) that if you fell asleep with a fan on, you would die.  I almost fell on the floor laughing when this guy walked on in.  Just a classic costume.  Really jealous that I didn’t think of it first.

But not all of their beliefs are so completely whacked out.  Some of them actually turn out to be true, even though at first they sound ridiculous.  And no, I’m not talking about kimchi curing everything… I’m talking about every Korean’s firm belief that Korea has four distinct seasons.

Now think about that for a minute.  My first reaction on hearing that is “duh, everywhere has that.”  But here’s the thing… I don’t know exactly what it is about Korea, but they really have distinct seasons.   Once it changes from Summer to Fall, you notice.  All of a sudden, there’s a little chill in the air that wasn’t there the day before.  Not like it’s bad, because summer is the death grip of hot around here.  Once it changes from Summer to Fall, it’s just never going to get that hot until the next year.

Now back to the rain on Halloween again.  All of a sudden, it dropped the temperature around town a good 20-30 F.  In one day.  And while I might be a little hasty about this, I’m wondering if we’re looking at winter deciding to start on this day.  Because I’ll tell you, it feels cold right now.  Temperature-wise, it’s not that cold, but because it’s the first cold day of the year, it feels bone chilling cold right now.

The cold has made the school a little different as well.  Well that and everyone seems to be scared to death of swine flu, so my classes are generally missing about 10 students a pop.  The school doesn’t have anything resembling central heating, but we do have basically giant space heaters on the wall.  It’s similar to what we had in England, but it definitely causes some interesting consequences…

Right now, my room is nice and toasty, but that’s because I had the heater on.  The heater happens to be right next to the computer, so if I want to be relatively comfortable while I’m writing, I have to turn the thing off.  This is because the heater comes with three settings: 1) Hot, 2) Need an oven mitt to touch it, and 3) Roasts a Christmas goose in three hours.

Now the thing with these is that the space heaters are obviously only good for the rooms themselves, which leaves the hallways at about the same temperature as it is outside.  As I’ve stated, it’s cold out.  So the moment you leave your classroom, you hit a blast of cold air.  Then I get back to my room, and I bit a sauna… so it’s a juggling match honestly.

I don’t know if the weather’s going to stay like this for the rest of the year, but I know that there’s a good chance that it’s all sweaters from here on out.

Haven’t put a lolcat up in a while…

Co-Teaching and 6th graders

Lead with something strong, right?  6th graders are spawn of Satan.  You’re basically looking at disrespectful, talkative, prepubescent bags of skin that just strive to make your life a little more interesting.  I don’t know one GEPIK teacher who looks at their 6th grade class and thinks “this is gonna be a great class.”  It’s usually more of a “dear God let them please shut up for just two minutes…”

But here’s the key: they’re just kids after all.  Technically, having two teachers in the classroom should be enough to handle all 30+ of them.  That would be the case in a perfect world.  Unfortunately, this world is far from perfect.

I really like my grade 6 co-teacher.  I really do.  She’s a cool person.  But we really don’t see eye to eye on teaching styles, classroom set-up, and things like that.  You know, just the important things.

The worst thing about the classes is just the design of the room.  There are three long rows of tables with six kids on either side.  The students that way get to face each other, and not the teacher or the board.  Leads to a whole lot of fooling around and other b.s. during the class.  To complicate things, the teacher’s desk is at one end while the projector is at the other.  The kids have to move their heads back and forth to pay attention to the projector and to pay attention to the teacher.  Did I mention they have the attention span of a catnip-cracked out starved furball?  It’s difficult.

The other issue kind of comes from our styles.  It’s surprised even me, but I tend to be a bit of a hardass towards the kids, while she’s much more willing to just shout over them.  I’d say during a given 6th grade class, probably about 75% of the kids just aren’t paying any attention, and they never get called on it by her.  When she’s explaining something, I’m walking around the room taking books away, telling kids to be quiet, and just other things to try to keep my sanity together.  I like to have a bit of chaos in the classroom at times, but I want to know where the chaos is headed.

My personal favorite thing happened yesterday though.  Found out as I was leaving work that she used the lesson plan I made for today earlier in the week.  So I had to come in early today and make up some other stuff.  Just not fun when you’ve already got to deal with kids who think they run the joint.  Grade 6 is the top of the school, so these kids fancy themselves some real badasses.  I really wish I could go to middle school with them for a day, just to see them get put in their place a little more.  I might give up a full day’s pay to see that.

But whatever.  It’s Friday.  I don’t have to see those kids for a whole week, and on top of that, I only have to deal with them for 4 hours.  As much as they just drive me up the f’ing wall, it’s over pretty fast.  Now I get to look forward to a weekend of sleep, hockey, and a pretty little thing that for some reason thinks I’m sexy.  Works for me.