South Korea: Arrival: “It’s a New Week!” by Allison Ogle

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Things here at my school are going really well! I’ve co-taught one English lesson so far and I have taught a lesson about my hometown(s). Because I am in a public Korean elementary school, a lot of the instruction during the day is in Korean. This means that it is really hard for me to be a regular classroom teacher. Instead, I am what the teachers call a “subject teacher” my job is essentially to provide English instruction as a native speaker of English as well as to share lessons about my home culture. I am planning on teaching a 10 week (one lesson per week) unit on America and American culture. The scary thing is I will be teaching these lessons to all of the grades in the school. First grade through sixth grade. That is kind of scary but I’m really excited to take on this role of being a bit of an EFL (English as a foreign language) specialist which is extremely similar to my endorsement that would allow for me to teach ELLs (English language learners) back home. I will essentially be teaching the same lesson to every class but it will be tailored to meet the language and developmental abilities of each grade. I’m supposed to start with some fourth and fifth grade classes on Thursday so I hope it goes well!

Last night, we as a school went out to dinner! It was really great! We ate a lot of traditional Korean foods and we also went out for coffee afterwards. I posted pictures of this in the pictures page here.Β (Click it, it will take you to the picture page πŸ™‚ ). I had a lovely night and tried several new foods like stingray/skate. It had a good taste but the texture was very different from how it looked.

I had a lovely time after school today with several of the teachers. Every Tuesday, the teachers get together to play badminton and have a good time. I really enjoyed badminton all throughout school but I never really had the opportunity to play it recreationally so it was really nice to be able to go play a fun sport with several of the teachers from the school (even the vice principal!). It was a great time! I really enjoyed how we could all play a sport together and not really need to use our language. We were all simply having fun! I am now glad that I was forced to take some of those PE classes in school πŸ™‚ knowing some of the rules to badminton came in handy!

I know this post was a lot of different things smashed together but a lot has happened in just a few days! Please go look at the pictures page if you want to see some of the pictures that I have taken while I’ve been here! It’s a bit more interesting than just reading all of this :).