We've started teaching this week. Melanie and I have very different teaching routines. I'm working with three Korean teachers for 5th and 6th grade and will be spending four hours a week with each class; Melanie is working with eleven Korean teachers for 1st through 4th grade, plus an after school class for the "fool students" and spends one hour a week with each class. And I go to a different, very rural school on Tuesdays, where I'll have classes with students numbering in the mid-single-digits, as opposed to the classes of 37 I have here.
Right now, I'm feeling frustrated that every day I finish my classes by lunch, at 12:30, and must stay at school until 5. What I wouldn't give for a private office! On the other hand, I am sitting in the teachers' room now, blogging, so I suppose I don't have it too bad.
As much as I'd like to generalize, the range of personalities is huge - with with students, with teachers and with other foreigners. Students from yelling-over-me-introducing-myself to the cutest, sweetest kids I've ever met; teachers from bossy (in Korean) to sitting-aside-videotaping-Melanie-teaching to actual constructive co-teaching that may even evolve into co-lesson planning in the coming months; foreigners from strait-as-an-arrow, why-did-you-leave-your-corporate-job to oh-my, do-you-always-sweat-so-profusely, I-see-why-you-married-a-Philipino, I-doubt-you-could-function-in-US-society.
Well, having now set a personal best for concentration of hyphens in a paragraph, I'm going to get back to the only book left from those I brought, The Bible in Modern English. It's a slow read.
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2 comments:
hopefully it's exciting, as well as frustrating; after all, "for everything there is a season"
Indeed, and now, in contrast to the two years previous, is a building season for me... securing my financial situation, setting up websites, reading and learning, working on my personal qualities with Melanie and being in another culture, etc.. When we leave, then it's adventure season again! And in February, of course, when we meet you guys in Thailand!
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