Thursday, October 10, 2013

In Which I Get a Round of Applause

So I've mentioned before that Nancy and I work at the same school. We have the same class schedule (with different classes) but we have breaks at the same time, etc. It's pretty awesome. At any rate, today we were going to class together and Nancy stopped me in the hall to tell me something, and my students were watching me through the hole in the frosted glass on the classroom door. When I went into class of seven third graders and said hello they all giggled and asked, "Teacher, you come together with girlfriend?" (I'd like to point out that at this point I'm pretty awesome at deciphering broken English.) I said, "I came down to class with my wife, yes." The students all gasped and said, "WIIIFE?" I said, "Yes, I am married, after all. I'm pretty sure I've told you this." At that, they all started clapping their hands in rhythm and singing, "Congratulation! Congratulation!" (Not to be confused with "Congratulations," because that is not what they were saying.) It was pretty awesome. I explained that I have been married for more than a year, but they just kept on congratulating me. So there you have it, more than a year later and I'm still getting congratulated on getting married.

I've realized that this is a pretty good opportunity to talk a little bit about our job, since I really haven't said much about it, aside from saying that it's easy. It is, but there's more to it. I remember when we were coming here, we found a blog that was written by a couple who worked at our school, and while they said a lot about Jeju, they hardly said anything about their school. That's pretty easy to do, as Jeju is so much cooler than school. But we wanted to know about the school, so maybe this will be useful to someone in the future. Anyway, overall we enjoy working at ILS. It's a pretty laid-back work environment. They let you wear pretty much whatever you want to teach in and there isn't a lot of supervision, so you can kind of use whatever style you like, though you do have to teach a pretty set material. As far as curriculum goes, you just teach out of books and workbooks. Planning is pretty unnecessary, outside of making the necessary copies. The students range from kindergartners (who are cute, and probably the best at English, besides the middle school students, but some of them tend to cry a lot) up to 8th graders. I have the whole range, though most of my students (outside the kindergartners and the 8th graders) are very much beginners. That can be fun a lot of the time, though, because they tend to say some funny things. Also, the lower-level workbooks have more fun songs that you get to sing. At any rate, I think that's about all I've got to say about school. I mean, there really isn't that much to tell. It's pretty easy.

And, that's all I've got for the day. Nancy should be getting on here and posting about our most recent hike soon, so look forward to that! I'll post a teaser photo.

Me in my Hulk T-shirt and my Korean hiking pants. I'd like to point out that there are good things and bad things about climbing on lava rock next to the ocean. The good thing is that the rock is rough, so even though it's wet you don't slip much. The bad thing is that it tends to be crawling with very large cockroaches. I managed, though.
This is Captain Danger out.

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