Just another month teaching English in Korea

The month of June has slipped away and I realize I've only written one post to document it's passing. And it was about sewage. So, lest you think I've lost interest in sharing my experiences or else I've truly got nothing better to write about than the rotten air, I'll list my excuses and then attempt to recall some of the past few weeks' highlights.

I didn't travel anywhere this month in an attempt to save money for summer vacation. It didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Nonetheless, the extra free time lent itself to thinking about preparing to plan for English Summer Camp. I am responsible for 2 weeks of summer camp, one at each of my schools. Since I can use the same lesson plans for both schools, this totals to 20 hours of teaching. As I don't have grades to write or final exams to prepare like all other teachers in the world, I can't complain about the end of semester stress that I'm catching wind of. But, I have been busy finishing up lessons in time for the exam, preparing review games, and thinking about summer camp.

Besides lesson planning, I've also been jogging a few evenings a week. It still feels silly taking the bus to go jogging, but not too many people run outside here and the traffic is dangerous, so it's best to run on the path by the river. You have to dodge a fair amount of senior citizens and strollers and giant bugs, but its pretty pleasant altogether. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to continue these evening jogs as rainy season is coming (a 3 week period of tropical downpours) followed by even higher temperatures and humidity levels. But by then I should be sweating enough just walking down the street to take care of a day's workout.

Other than that, I've just been lazy. I blame it on the heat, but my friend, insisting that our lethargy is due to lack of iron, hosted a steak night at her apartment the other night. True to her Australian roots, she managed to pull off some pretty tasty steaks with her one electric burner and 6 inch frying pan. My contribution was a pineapple cheesecake that was doomed from the start. With no oven and no mixer of any kind I attempted to make a dessert from scratch. I was devastated, though hardly surprised, when the filling melted to soup 2 minutes after removing it from the refrigerator. Somewhere between the wafers of gelatin and the vegan German instant whipped cream I went wrong.

Let's see... what else has happened this month? There was the day we were talking about wishes and I instructed the students to draw a picture and write what they plan to do for summer vacation in one box and what they wish they could do in another box. As I went around to check their work, I found one student had written in the second box beneath a picture of an airplane "I wish I could fly to North Korea and dead Kim Jong Il." This is the first and only passionate expression I have heard from a Korean in regards to their unfriendly neighbors to the North and the recent rise in tension. I helped had to laugh at the student's cheekiness, and at myself as I helped her change "dead" to "kill," but refrained from calling on her to read her response aloud.

Then there was the day I ate lunch instead of going to my last class. No one informed me that lunch was moved to from the 5th to the 6th period that day, and no one bothered to come get me from the cafeteria when I failed to show up for my 6th period class.

With last minute schedule changes always popping up, and me being informed maybe 50% of the time, you can see why I wasn't very concerned last week when no one was in the English lab after the bell for one of my classes. After 5 minutes went by, one of the students ran in apologizing. "Sorry, teacher. Crying."

So one of the students is crying? I couldn't see how that detained all 25 of them, but I've learned to live with a lot of gray areas. And all I had planned for the day was a movie so the tardiness wasn't a major issue. "Math exam," she offered in explanation. Oh, so maybe one student is crying she failed the math exam, and a group of them are comforting her. And the rest are still finishing the exam? I've also learned to live with filling in they gray areas myself. Then the students started trickling in. All but one or two with red eyes and tears on their faces, cradling their elbows with bright red wrists dangling in front of them. What in the world? A massive beating. The only explanation I got was "math exam." I didn't feel like a horrible teacher anymore for playing a movie the whole period to give myself a break.

All in all, summer vacation may be just around the corner, but the more stress levels rise at school (for students and teachers alike), the more my 8 days off is looking pretty meager.