First Days of School

With my first week of classes finished and a new one begun I feel good about my job so far. My employer has been very accommodating to our needs (he bought me a bicycle this week so I can get around faster) and the other teachers are very nice, many of who speak English. Still, every day I go to school I feel very nervous, as if expecting all hell to break loose or the students to all come to the realization that I'm not a real teacher but a fraud. However as soon as class starts, my worries disappear and I have a great time. Basically my job is to make the students speak and if I can make that happen, I'm successful. Unfortunately there are some classes where nobody wants to speak and those classes are the most difficult.

I have 2 classes that are particularly interesting as the students want to get into a prestigious high school which has difficult tests and interviews which must be passed for entrance into the school. I have 2 months to teach about 20 students to speak English. There are a few students in the classes who I think can make it but most of the students have never been in an English academy before. They all take English in middle school of course but in large classes, the opportunities to speak are limited. Before I started teaching my boss emphasized the importance of these classes and I felt a lot of pressure to help these kids succeed. (He asked me how long it would take to get them prepared - I would have said 6 months but, feeling they didn't have that long, I diverted the topic slightly. Later I asked a teacher and she told me that they must take the interview in 2 months). In my opinion, these students should have been going to an English academy for at least a year before the interview, instead of cramming with 2 months to go. However at least they will get some speaking in and those classes have been my most enjoyable so far.

This past weekend we went to see me and my wife's former employers in Gunsan. They invited us for supper but then said they would take us out. We waited for an hour and a half at E-Mart which luckily has a lot of shopping and a Baskin Robbins inside before they picked us up. The last time we saw them, my wife and I were secretly dating while both working at their school so they didn't even know about us until a few months ago...until after we were married...so our meeting was a little awkward at first but then we talked for a few hours over Chinese food and had a great time. They also want their daughter to attend a prestigious high school so when they heard I was teaching these interview classes, they had me ask her some questions, which she did very well at...but then she's been going to an English academy that her parents own for a few years so I wasn't surprised.

Every day I work, I eat supper at the school and every day it's kimchi and rice. At first I thought it would be very boring but every day there are 3 different kinds of kimchi and every day they are different (only the cabbage kimchi have I seen twice in one week). There has been kimchi made with radishes, cucumber, sprouts, tiny fish, peppers, ham, cabbage and others I can't remember right now. One of the student's mothers prepares the kimchi for our school and every day it's great.

My Korean classes are going well, although we are going through the alphabet right now at a snail's pace. I'm pretty good with the alphabet so I can't wait to get onto the next part. Over half of the students in my class are Chinese and many of the sounds we are learning in the alphabet are not used in Chinese so it can take half a class to get each student to say one letter correctly. It's slow but fun as I get to meet new people. I've exchanged email addresses with an American who is also married to a Korean so it's nice to have someone in the same shoes as me, being a foreigner in Korea married to a Korean.