Friday, May 2, 2008
We found corndogs in the super market!! Here we are frying them since they do not fit in our small toaster oven.
The view from my classroom window
My whiteboard.... I love this thing
The table in my classroom. This is before the kids mess it all up on me and make me clean after every class.
The calender that one of the kids made for me on the wall. It's a penguin!!
This is my desk/table in my classroom for all my books/papers/pens and most importantly MY COFFEE!!
This is Amy, yet again, I really need to get Kyle going with this blogging thing. Anyways, I just stepped in the door from my second day of teaching. I wouldn't really call it teaching so much as playing games. I went in to work today to find out that today is game day. Every Friday is game day. So with my first class, the very beginners, since I didn't know a game to teach them and they were new and didn't know it was game day, we continued with learning the alphabet. Today we associated words with the letters of the alphabet and today I also had a second student in this class. After we did word association for a while, we then moved into learning "Hello", "Good-Bye", "My name is", and "What's your name". I know they didn't really grasp the whole concept, but they definitely learned hello and goodbye as they kept saying it to me whenever they would leave or enter the main room of the school.
My second class we played hangman for a while on the board until the kids became out of hand with it and then we switched to a board game. The boys seemed disinterested and kept trying to talk on their cell phones (yes, grade 3-4 with cell phones in class). So I had to make them stop quite a bit. There were two boys in particular, Simon and Tyler, that were very bad. They were climbing the on the desks, throwing things, and just not listening to anything I had to say. I ended up putting Simon in the corner, as is Korean custom and because he was the instigator, and he had to put his hands up in the air above his head. Whenever his hands would fall, I would have to tell him to put them back up and to not talk to anyone. He still didn't listen very well. Next class I will make him sit outside and give everyone who is listening a stamp in their "stamp book" (the stamp book is something that measures how well the students are doing and how well they are behaving. When a student gets so many stamps in their stamp book, they get money from their parents. I can also put "x"'s in for anyone who is misbehaving, not doing homework, or not studying for tests. ) It is a huge motivator to give the well behaved stamps and the not well behaved nothing.
I definitely spent my ten minute break (the only break I get during the teaching hours, which is only from 3:30-7:50, so that is not bad) in the teachers lounge with John. We talked about the situation in the classroom.
My third class was with just one student and we spent the time playing a mixture of games, from hangman to bingo to scrabble (our own made up version that doesn't take a lot of time on the junior scrabble board). He seemed to have fun, but is still very shy in front of me since he is very new at the school. I am supposed to have a second student in this beginner class as well, but she didn't come today.
With the fourth class we played a game called Zingo and I did the same with the fifth and sixth classes as well. It seems as though the girls are more eager to learn and participate in classes than the boys are. Even when I ask the class questions and get everyone to give a response, the boys try their hardest to not participate. I am going to have to think of something else because they refuse to work in groups with girls as it is embarrassing for them.
The day was very loud and very hot. My classroom was so hot and humid. I had the windows open and the fan going, but with 10 stinky, hot and sweaty kids in the room who do not wear deodorant, there seemed to be no escape. John (the American teacher) and I are always talking about turning on the air conditioning, which scares the Koreans there since they are not cold at all. I think we will turn it on next week if this keeps up. It is just so hot in there and it is just going to keep getting hotter. They say it is hotter here than normal. I was still being told how pretty I am and how nice my eyes are all day. Still feels weird when they say it. Some of the kids even took pictures of me with them on their camera phones.
I took a cab home from work tonight. It was the first time I did that. I had Esther, my director, picking me up and dropping me off. She was not able to tonight, so I took the 15-20 minute cab ride home for a whopping $3.10 CDN. Not too shabby hey? Things in general are much cheaper here. So I didn't know the address for my house, the cab drivers also do not know intersections very well since Koreans do addresses by association with a larger building or complex in the vicinity, so I found out how to say middle school "jung-hak-gyo", of course that is just my way of sounding it out. So, I live next to a middle school. The cab ride was very easy. Although, trying to confirm where I was going proved to be a challenge. I am becoming a master at sign language!! Ha.
Anyways, I am going to go relax and watching some English TV with thousands of subtitles. Oh yeah, also today, Kyle got our cell phone here (I will let people know the number by email when I get it) and we had our own internet set up so we no longer have to mooch someone else's wireless, which had an awful connection anyways.
Jetlag is still bothering us, we have been up everyday between 5am-6am and then we are exhausted by the time we get home. We will try and stay up a little later tonight and see what happens. We should be up around 9:30am here, which is 6:30pm Saskatchewan time and 5:30pm BC time. I think.
One more thing, this weekend is a long weekend so we have Monday off!!
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