"Miss Camp, what is on today's schedule?"

Oh my. It’s only 10:47, but I’m thoroughly exhausted, so I’m not sure how long this entry will be. The reason I’m thoroughly exhausted, in case you were wondering, is because I went jogging for the first time tonight! I’m pretty excited, in case you can’t tell. But more about that later.

Today was an okay day. This weekend I sat down and created an Excel spreadsheet schedule that defined what I should be doing with about 90% of my time. I’m hoping that this time I’ve remedied the problem with my previous Excel spreadsheet schedules—not allotting any free time, and then finding it impossible to keep to said schedule. In case you were interested, the breakdown goes something like this:

Studying Korean: 14 hours
Writing: 14 hours
Teaching: 17 hours
Lesson Planning: 12.5 hours
Running: 5 hours
Watching movies: 6 hours
Total: 68.5 hours

Assuming I’m awake for roughly 112 hours a week, that’s not too bad. So today was the first day I tried to follow the schedule, and it was mostly a success. I woke up at 7:30 for breakfast, then actually sat down and studied Korean this morning for an hour before school. I left for school today at 10:15. Classes were a little perplexing, because the books came in sometime last week, so my co-teacher just copied the first few pages of the workbook and had them prepared for me. I, unfortunately, wasn’t prepared to teach that material, but I did it anyway. It’s just really stupid for me to teach grammar, since I can’t explain the material in the best way, and it just makes it unnecessarily more difficult to learn, because the students have to learn it in a foreign language. I complained enough about this in my Korean language classes, now I’m subjecting to poor Korean students to it. It would be better, I would argue, if I left all the grammar teaching to the Korean teachers, and just came up with games to play that would 1) encourage students to talk by making it fun, and 2) build on the grammar structures they were already learning. That is, I think, the idea of the Fulbright program. But because my schools went out and bought these new books, I’m going to have to use them. The problem with a textbook is that it lends itself to a lot of writing, but not a lot of talking. Maybe I will try to fight for a few lessons without the book at DMS. (I’m not going to bother trying to get anything I want at NMS, because I’m so frustrated with the non English ability of the English teachers.)

Anyway, it didn’t go so badly out of the book in 1st grade, because what I was teaching was really basic, and didn’t require a lot of explaining (and was probably a review for them anyway.) But just to give you an idea, the first third grade lesson was about the difference between ‘countables’ and ‘uncountables.’ I’m not sure I ever heard those terms myself. Anyway, think of the reason why you say “How many oranges…?” versus “How much milk…?” Oranges are countable. Milk is not. So I was teaching “How many” and “How much” as well as “a little milk/a few oranges” and “many oranges/much milk.” But it was even more confusing, because the book then wanted students to write negative statements. “There isn’t much milk in the bottle.” wtf? I’m not sure they even understood that “not much milk” and “a little milk” are the same thing. Then think of the exceptions… “How much paper?” (But paper is countable! Pieces of paper are countable, paper is not. Now imagine me explaining this to non-English speakers.)

So yeah, I basically wanted to kill myself during the two third grade lessons. The good news is that there are only 2 third grade lessons each week at NMS, so now those are through. I think it will go much better at DMS, where my co-teacher already knows this stuff and can just translate everything I say. But the question is, why am I teaching this? The Korean teachers are perfectly capable of teaching this, and could explain it, much more clearly, in a fraction of the time. A textbook written in Korean would do the trick even better! I should be having them play games and perform dialogues, not teaching this shit.

Sigh. I think I’m done complaining. On a good note, I explained my rewards system today, and most classes were really receptive to it. As you can imagine, teaching out of the book could definitely lead to not much conversation (a little conversation [grrr]), so I made tickets to give out when students volunteer to answer or speak aloud. 10 tickets = 1 prize. Excitement. After my 5th period class, Mr. Go drove me home. Today was our first day in the car without the principal, and I was afraid it would be awkward. His English level is pretty low, but he is, if nothing else, enthusiastic, so we managed to make conversation. When I got in, he was listening to Korn, which was unexpected. Oh yeah, Mrs. Oh informed me that Mr. Go won’t be taking me to school anymore after September (August?), so I’ll need to take the bus. Now, I wouldn’t mind taking the bus, except it would take me about 45 minutes to walk from the bus stop, which added to the 20 minute bus ride is just not okay. Hopefully Mr. Go will still be coming to pick me up from the bus stop. I also got paid my settling-in allowance today, apparently, but I don’t know how to access it, because I don’t know how to use the ATM. Sigh. I guess I will ask Miss Kim to help me on Thursday. Mrs. Oh was also explaining several other aspects of my pay that I simply didn’t understand. But it’s not as if she can suddenly know English better, so I just accepted half-understanding, knowing that at some point it will lead to some kind of awkwardness when I do the wrong thing. Ah well, surely she must know that she’s explaining poorly, and anticipate that sort of situation.

Anyway, as Mr. Go was driving me home, he asked me if I like spicy food, and I replied enthusiastically in the affirmative. That’s sort of true—I really like spicy Mexican, but my experience so far with spicy Korean is that it’s in things that don’t taste that good to begin with, so it’s just unenjoyable. But nowadays I do a lot of enthusiastic agreeing. So then Mr. Go spontaneously decided to take me to some little restaurant to eat… what I will affectionately refer to as “meat-on-a-stick.” We got our meat-on-a-stick to go, as well as ice cream, and then we sat at a random playground picnic table to eat the ice cream. Mr. Go was very apologetic that he would not be able to drive me anymore, exclaiming several times that he loves taking me (would love to continue?) but there’s something to do with someone (in the school board, perhaps) who would kill him for it. I don’t know either, but several times he did the cut-throat gesture, so apparently it’s a pretty serious thing. Or whatever. (I’d like to do a control-F Find to see how many times I’ve said ‘or whatever’ to imply that I didn’t actually mean whatever I said before.) Or whatever.

So at some point I arrived home, meat-on-stick in hand. It actually proved to be really good—there were several levels of spiciness, and I think I ate a low-grade one and my host sister ate a high-grade one, because she nearly exploded, whereas my mouth was just pleasantly warm. Luck of the draw, kid. Luck of the draw. I then proceeded to spend literally the next three and a half hours working on the rest of my lesson plans for the week. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked (isn’t it always that way?), but I did finish one or two things, including my spreadsheet in which I will record what each class does at each meeting. Unfortunately, because of differing schedules and holidays and stuff, my two schools will always be at different places in the books anyway, so I’ll have to really pay attention and stay on top of what I’m teaching.

Around nine, when I couldn’t possibly sit in front of my laptop anymore, I surprised myself and actually stuck to the schedule by going jogging. It’s a good way for me to explore, and I found a couple of neat new streets tonight. It’s a little embarrassing, because I stick out so much, but hopefully a month or so of this will get me in a shape that I wouldn’t mind turning heads. Apparently my host mother’s major in college was health and nutrition, so she’s offered to help me diet. We’ll see how that goes. Most recently it’s manifested itself by her foisting the seaweed soup on me.

But it was actually one of the nicest runs I’ve experienced. I began sweating profusely the moment I stepped out the door, and I literally felt like I was going to die from the heat a couple times, but besides that it was great. No real difference from Florida. I was out for thirty minutes, so really I jogged 15 minutes and walked 15 minutes, but that’s still not bad. I was a little sore by the end, and when I came in all I did was lay down on my floor in front of the fan for a full 10 minutes, but after a cold shower I felt almost human again, and accomplished. My plan is take every third day off from jogging, so it’s on tomorrow and then off on Wednesday. Surely, I can do it.

What I didn’t do today was write, which is disappointing. I haven’t done it for the past few days, as you may have noticed, but I’ll try to get back on track with the new schedule. And tomorrow I HAVE to make my list and figure out what I need Mom to send me as far as winter clothes, because they could take two months to get here, so I need to get on top of it.

Take care!