Home For Lost Photos

Siblings with matching outfits. There are also couples with matching clothing that's a popular thing.

So sometimes you take pictures and you just aren't sure where they should reside. They have some immediate value and you want to share them, but the hard part is figuring out where. Thus, I am making this into a small home for (current) pictures that deserve some sort of acknowledgement due to their sheer awesomeness. That or they're pretty neat, or vaguely interesting. You get the idea.

Everything over here is cute! This is paper clay for our art project.

So we get these interesting Dream Science kits which are of varying interest to our kids. Mostly due to their current fine motor skills or lack thereof.

So I have the big green yogurt bank, now I just need to get the adorable teeny ones to go with it. 

Playing my adapted Scrabble game in class with the older girls. They're surprisingly not being super lazy.

This stuff is delicious. Dried, seasoned seaweed is so good.

Not the best shot ever, but I caught a really pretty sunset.

Korean versions of familiar board games! Pretty cool.

Stella made these since she has a tendency to make many things rainbow, but I'm not sure what they are. At first I thought caterpillars, but I really have no idea.

I think I explained pepperoni penguin a couple posts prior to this one. But everyone should love pepperoni penguin, so here you go. Even if it is an anatomically deficient penguin.

Aren't we cute? Here we are sitting waiting for the 105 bus at the bus stop near our school!

The view of the exit doors for the bus.

We visited this rundown arcade in Cheongju near the bus terminal, it was cute.

The sign for the arcade, isn't it interesting? The Engrish makes it even more fun.

Chance of Victory with by Good Game

Some of these things are not like the others... 

Koreans and their clothing... it's so cute though.

My class of older girls? Yeah, they're kind of weird.

You see Gangnam Style references everywhere. Written with dry erase markers on boards in front of stores, on huge signs, everywhere.

I will play you when I get home, just you wait Viva Pinata.

This is the flower that was started before I got here. It's a cute little marigold.

This is adorable. Sarah is so cute and animated and she is, of course, talking to the daydreamer Evelyn.

Ellena has this thing for writing/talking about magic ddong powder and Lily which just sounds awkward and I really don't know what it means.

Aiden made robots because he is just that cool. He apparently drew these freehand too.

I have no idea what this is, but it's from the kitchen and I sometimes see it sitting out in the sun. I'm not sure I want to know and want to live in blissful ignorance. Also, what I think is Julia's hand.

These are crushed up seeds (that you crush yourself) that you get at Saboten. You pour this delicious dark sauce on it and mix it up and dip your food into it. It's so amazing.

Aiden made a bee without wings. We are kindred spirits as I have drawn wingless bees in my time too.

Speaking of bees, this is the packaging for baby wipes that are around the school.

Who knew Snoopy was a chef?

This is the tissue box for HomePlus tissues. Why is everything so cute here?

I wish I had gotten a picture of this earlier, but I'm not sure what these are. Previously there was an older woman sitting on the tarp whacking them with a stick. 

They cut down the rice field near us, but now it looks really neat.

At first I got these because the whale is adorably smug. Then I tried them and they were delicious. Also crunchy, which is good sensory input.

This snack was dumplings! They were so good.

I don't remember why I took this picture. I think they saw me taking a picture of my snack and wanted to pose. This is Daniel, Evelyn, and Stella.

Attack of the sticker monster, on my Kindle case!

Me with two of my favorite little girls, Sarah and Evelyn.

I wasn't aware that Tomas was into the confederacy, who knew?

In which sleepy Sarah fell asleep in my lap, which seems to be a trend.

I found this butterfly in the middle of the road in the middle of the night (on our walk back from the bar). Poor thing was so cold, but it's so gorgeous!

Dunkin Donuts has these fun Halloween donuts! I should have grabbed one of the chocolate ones, they look so good. I guess there's always tomorrow.

Pokemon snack! An odd chocolately snack, but the packaging is cute.

You get this little logo thing at the bottom and then a little hologram prize too. Fun stuff. :)

Life's Little Frustrations

One of these shining faces is no longer at our hagwon, I found out today. P.S. The cake was tasty.

Happy Monday everyone (or the end of Monday for us here in Korea), or at least something like that. So I realized that, aside from needing to play catch up yet again, in talking about the positive experiences in Korea, you are not doing any favors by ignoring the negative parts either. Certainly, you could just gloss over the not as positive pieces, but I feel that is a disservice to everyone, especially those who will take the same route after we've come and gone. Zach has already sort of touched on that topic. 

This morning, in a sort of muddled conversation with our boss, I was informed that one of the students in my class of older girls was no longer attending our hagwon. I was preoccupied with preparing for class for my kindy kids, so I wasn't really that attentive to the conversation. I mentioned it to Zach later who had to talk to her about some other things and he filled me in on the information gaps that I wasn't sure of. Apparently the student had not placed well in her latest English test at school and so her mother pulled her from our hagwon.

I was under the impression that our director was not very happy this morning due to this, though it's hard to tell with her. I already know that she likes Zach more than she likes me (she has professed as much), so whatever. Though, he told me that she didn't seem to care all that much.

My bone to pick with this one is that teaching three to four 9-10 year old (international age, not Korean) girls is already hard enough when they're around the same skill level, but when three of them are more advanced and one of them just started learning English a few months ago, there's going to be a bit of an issue. These girls are already hard enough to engage and adding in them trying to translate things to her and her copying what they write really just makes it all the more challenging.

If I had had it my way I would have preferred to split the four girls into two groups based on skill level, with me taking one pair and Zach taking the other, but it was just not a viable option.

Anyway, I spent a fair amount of the day bent out of shape about this whole thing even though in the few months that we've been here, I doubt I could have made much headway. I like being a good employee, doing my job well, getting things done. The problem is when the task is unrealistic. If anything, the student who is no longer with us should have been placed in a much lower level class (like Zach's lower elementary class, or even lower) with an English speaking Korean teacher who could explain the concepts and build her vocabulary before putting her with students who speak decent English when she is struggling to form even the most basic of sentences.

I suppose in the long run this will help me in other ways too, to realize that while I really appreciate people liking me (as our director appreciates me as a currency sign, primarily), it's not the end of the world if someone doesn't. And also that you can't make everyone happy, you just have to do the best you can with what you have to work with.

It's also worth mentioning that today was actually a really good day in class. I had the three girls who are more advanced and I was able to engage them, not worry about attempting (with very little success) to explain concepts to the lower level girl, and actually direct them as a group much more easily. I think games are the way to their little hearts, and with students that are more skilled they are able to pick up the idea faster and not have to spend a good amount of time trying to help out their friend. It will be different two days a week when I only have 2 of the girls, but maybe this will allow me to go further with them since they're the two most advanced students of the group.

Tutoring and getting the shaft from directors

So I figured it would be a good time to talk about directors in the hagwon system in Korea.  So there are a lot of horror stories online about Korean hagwon directors and since I have met two I am totally a certified expert at this point.  Most hagwons are small and only really have a school director and a few teachers with maybe one or two staff people on hand to help run the school.  This is a position of absolute power within the school and what they say goes.  Some directors are benevolent and just want to run the school as best they can while maximizing profits, while others are malignant tumors on the misshapen backside of a particularly ornery Honey Badger.

This thing will mess you up!

What you need to understand about directors is that they are after everything is said and done after one thing, and that is money.  Teaching in Korea is an amazing experience filled with adventure and more than a little frustration, but the number one frustration throughout the entire experience will almost certainly be your director and the things that they will do to shaft you.  After all is said and done and no matter how nice they treat you as a foreigner in Korea you are literally a walking dollar sign to a hagwon director and they will make your life a living hell if they don't think they are squeezing as much money out of you as they possibly can.  Hagwons at their heart are businesses so if you aren't being profitable then you will regret it.

Children's Museum of Seoul

Our director is nice, but just behind that niceness lies a cold business woman who doesn't so much care about what goes on in the school as long as it doesn't effect her pocketbook.  She gives us general outlines of what to do for class and what to follow but when it comes down to it she does not give us the information or what we need to follow the schedule she has laid out for us.  So that ends up making us have to restructure the lessons, or change things around or even not do a class just to make it so we can survive the week.  The best part is our director doesn't actually care, as long as the kids are happy, the parents are happy, so the director makes money.

Picture from a science museum in Seoul

The desire for the director to make money leads me into my other topic tutoring.  Tutoring is a funny thing in Korea, technically it is illegal for ESL teachers like Manda and I to tutor people in English because it is a breach of our contract and can get us kicked from the country.  The catch is that the school you work for can actually set up tutoring for you, and thus making it okay/  The catch however is that the school will take a huge sum of the profits from the tutoring.  Manda is getting paid 13k won an hour for the tutoring (even though I am present I am not sure if I am getting paid for it at all), however the normal price for a tutoring session hovers around 40k an hour.  That means our director is pocketing close to 30k an hour for tutoring where she is literally doing no work.  This is pretty common because the directors know they can get away with it.  We are going to have a talk with our director, however how much things change really depends.  I am sure the term lazy will be thrown around quite a bit.  I don't think the tutoring would be such an issue if it weren't for a few problems.

The first big issue is the person we are tutoring.  Originally Manda though she would be tutoring one of her students on the weekend, which means she would be teaching a small child.  Manda is comfortable with teaching children so that would have been fine with her (although hours are probably the biggest problem with the tutoring and I've yet to talk about those).  To our surprise who we were actually tutoring was the father of Manda's student.  A middle aged salary man, whose interests include work, his family, and that is pretty much it.  He also talks about smoking a lot and how it is bad for you, which seems to be a topic he can speak the most about at any given time.  The second issue is that the man who we are now tutoring is in terms of fluency a level 2 of 4.  He knows a few words of English, enough to get him by if he was in America or England, however he has to think and does not understand English when spoken at a naturally fast pace.  This makes talking hard because there are a ton of awkward silences which I know Manda in particular has problems with.

As I stated above the biggest issue with this tutoring is the time.  The man in question literally has to have it be midday on Saturday (and he wants to do it every single week) which is a HUGE hindrance on our weekend.  One of the biggest reasons we came to Korea was the idea that on the weekends we could go out and have adventures, and being forced to wait until late Saturday afternoon to go out and do things just is not going to fly.  We won't be able to hop on a bus and go to Busan or Seoul and enjoy a full day, and moreover we don't feel like we can even make plans to go out for the weekend due to the tutoring.  We have plans to talk to our director about this, and I suppose we will keep you posted on how it goes!

Hanboks Up Close

This was originally going to be one post about Chuseok, but after looking at all the pictures I have and all the content I wanted, I really decided it was best to focus on one and then look more closely at all the details. So this is our detailed post! By detailed I mean up close images of the hanboks. The different hanboks were all beautiful and it was fun to inspect them up close and personal. 

I am going to try to have a hanbok made for myself to bring home, before the end of our contract is up. What a neat thing to bring home and keep to remember the trip by!