Finally feeling like fall in Seoul

It's been a beautiful week in Seoul. Dean and I were discussing how the weeks have been flying by lately. My job isn't a chore like it was in my first two weeks--I thought I was going to be miserable with this job. But now that I don't have to teach the book for 90% of the my classes (it depends on the co-teacher), I can plan my own lessons. Most of the teachers prefer me to play ESL games with the kids, and I have a great time with it. On a Sunday night, I am extremely nervous--what if the kids hate it? Will they understand it? Is it going to engage all the students or only the ones participating? How can I get them all interested? What is the goal of the lesson? Is it too easy for them? Too advanced? I honestly have nightmares about my classroom games going wrong. With 40 kids per class, when things go wrong, they go very, very wrong.

But I've been lucky in choosing games that can be adapted well for my classes. This week, I played a sort of ESL Pictionary. I split them into 3 teams and one person from each team had to come to the chalkboard. I would give a sentence (the sillier = the better) like, "There is a monster under my bed", "I am cooking dinner but there are problems", or "My friend does not like my cat." They had to draw a picture (5 points), write the sentence correctly (10 points), and the team with the most creative drawing received an extra 5 points. The kids made some really, really amusing drawings and I had a great time with them (for the most part).

Yesterday, my co-teacher with the best English, Yunhee, and I had a class canceled so we sat outside on the benches and talked. She said she was really pleased to see how well I have adjusted and how I'm really comfortable in the classroom now. She also said that the kids love the games, which made me feel *so relieved*. Middle school kids can be brutal.

This is one of my favorite classes--they make my Thursdays awesome. The boy in the front told me I looked like Tinkerbell yesterday. It was strange.


Playing Pictionary...didner? Dindner? Ding...DINNER! Fourth time's the charm.


The three teams competing.


Munsung in the fall. This was taken from where I sit after I finish my lunch. There are some nice benches in front of the school. It's amusing to watch the kids play soccer, although NO females join in...at all. It's ONLY boys. According to my co-teachers, the girls in Korea are not encouraged to play sports as an extracurricular activity at all. I spied the three girls on the left with a soccer ball and was really happy for a moment, then I realized they were just throwing it up into the nearby tree to see how many leaves they could get to fall.


Gyeonghye, one of my best students in my extra class. We were playing 20 questions with Post-Its--she was Ban Ki Moon (the current Secretary General of the UN).


One of my best students--one of the few that actually is really interested in having conversations when I'm not teaching. It's nice to talk to students who don't look like they are constantly in pain listening to you speak! I think he's going to a high school next year that specializes in the study of foreign languages. In Korea, the students apply to high schools the way Americans apply for college. Most of the kids from my area are going to the high school very close to Munsung, but some are going to high schools to study traditional arts, technical science, and foreign language. The third year middle schoolers have their SATs 14th-19th and they are pretty strung out.


This video is of my extra class playing 20 Questions.
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Check out the rest of my Korean videos at http://www.veoh.com/userVideos.html?username=caligalux I also updated my flickr page, so you can check out the rest of my Munsung pictures there.