Back to Seoul. Back to Teaching.

*Before I begin this blog, I want to apologize to my followers (I don't mean this in a deistic way). I try to post at least 4 times a month, and I slacked for the last 3 months. I blame my lack of Internet usage and proximity to a computer since I was backpacking.

Week 1 is the toughest week for any teacher to face. For this particular teacher, it was exceptionally tough. First of all, I've been gone for the last 3 months backpacking. If you haven't done it, I urge you to save all your money and do it! Backpacking means that the only worries you have are:

How low can you get ______?

Where is your next destination?

Where are you sleeping tonight?

What day trips are you doing?

What are you going to eat?

Each of these questions takes very little decision making. For instance if you are in Thailand, a "hard decision" would be green curry or pad thai? Another good question would be $7 room with A/C or $5 with fan?

Furthermore, backpacking means hours of laying on a beach, bus, or hotel room. It also means hours of strolling and sightseeing. With all this in mind, you can guess I had it pretty good for the last 3 months. Now that I'm back in Seoul, it is time to work back all that I had spent and let go of all the r & r.

I was lucky enough to have a generous FM that gave me a schedule of 24 hours being shifts of 6 hours per day on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I have 4 different classes of which I have already prepped 3 from past terms. Easy enough in my mind. When I actually stepped into the classroom, old habits came into play; arranging desks, writing a welcome message on the board, setting out name tags and take home papers. Each day I had to meet and memorize a new set of students. Besides 2, I had not met or taught any of the other 150. Thankfully, my icebreaker worked. I would make the entire class stand in a circle to play Categories. This game involves passing a ball to the person next to you after you've named an item in the category. Colors: red, blue, yellow etc. If a person repeats an item already said or goes "uhhh", that person is the loser and I can ask them anything I want: "What's your hobby?" "Have you traveled outside of the U.S.?" or my favorite, "Do you have a girlfriend? Boyfriend?" It's pretty empowering until they decide on categories like Korean companies, singers, or pencil case brands. Eesh! The icebreaker surprisingly went well even with middle schoolers. Afterwards was the hard part; teaching.

It is naturally easier for me to teach middle school students. For some reason, we get a long well. I'd like to think I'm like a big sister or maybe the middle school boys are crushing. Just kidding! So the Eagle and Birdie middle school classes went smoothly. The students listened to me, took notes, and even acted during the end of class project. Surprisingly, memory elementary was the hardest for me to get back into especially since I had trained new instructors in this program. I forgot how much energy it takes to "teacher-tain" the class. Yes, that's a combination of teach + entertain. The responsible and caring part of me also threw in as many grammar lessons as possible to ascertain their level of understanding. This attempt at actually teaching left me with elementary school students yawning during the story and participating very little. I later found out that this class was a repeat class of Tera students who were bored of the structure. At our next class I decided to focus on fun letting the teaching part weave into the lesson and it worked! We actually stopped in the middle of our story and had a relay race to demonstrate how spies used runners to transport messages during the Civil War. The more and more I have fun with these students, the more and more I remember how fun and good I was at teaching Memory English level. I can already tell which classes will be the bad ones (speaking too much Korean, not listening to me, or bored). Nevertheless, I love a good challenge. I'll be ready for Week 2 throwing in so many YouTube clips, anecdotes, and energy that these kids won't have a chance to even yawn or distract.

By the end of the week my voice was hoarse and my throat was sore. My back and feet ached too. The worst part is I introduced the bad habit of eating after 10pm, when my shift is over. Thankfully, I joined a gym the week I got back to Seoul and am running again. I'm also a little scared of how cold it still is in Seoul. I already have a runny nose, a slight cough, and the polluted air is drying out my skin. I'm losing my beach bumming tan!

Despite all these negatives, I'm happy I could sublet my co-worker John's apartment while he goes on a term-break. I don't have to put down a 5 million won deposit, and I am sharing rent with Dave. John even left us a massive apartment with an entertainment system. All I have left to do now is catch up on How I Met Your Mother and Gossip Girl so I don't have to think about "teachertaining".