The wonderful thing about kinders...

So today is a long overdue post on the goings on here in Korea. We've been teaching at the school now for about 2 weeks. Rather I should say Kay has been teaching here for 2 weeks, as I was out sick for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of the first week (technically I'm still sick but I'm gradually on the mend). It's been quite an adjustment here between the jetlag, starting class right away and handling handfuls of 3-5 year olds.

The first week was probably easier on me... I just had to stay home and cough myself silly through the days and nights, Kay on the otherhand got to work shortstaffed to manage young children. Fortunately they were able to manage well.

The second week shaped up to be much easier (though as I type this I hear Kay chasing down a four year old calling out 'Come back! Come back to the classroom!' from the hallway ;) ). We lost our original secretary to the other campus but gained another, and we're starting another Korean teacher this week (bilingual) to take care of the youngest class, and Jasmine will get a chance to step back and take on her more administrative duties as head teacher.

This is going to be a pretty erratic update as I'm on one of my 'off periods' but as we're a bit understaffed until the new teacher starts full time my attention keeps getting pulled away. I'll try to nutshell as much as I can...

I've been really sick (some viral kind of bronchitis it seems... meaning antibiotics don't help at all). I'm getting better and hopefully will be back to par by the end of the long weekend.

School is both rough and rewarding. The school started out very ambitiously in terms of what it tries to teach. They have math, science, drama, cooking, music, phys ed, phonics, writing and thematic projects. These children have full days 5 days a week at all ages (3 - 5) and it's made things very packed especially in trying to plan activities and make lesson plans. Usually by the end of the day both the teachers and students are tired (and somehow, tired teachers are just drained but tired students get wired, emotional and often erratic.) We are making progress, though the language barrier has some issues. It's tough to be an effective authority figure when the students don't understand what you're saying. It's one thing to be able to dole out discipline to students when they're bad, it's another thing to try and enforce and explain rules and problems when language is an impediment. The youngest students are also still only 3 years old and often don't always understand that they're doing something wrong when they're joyfully running around smacking other kids. It can also be tough in the reverse when students want to communicate things to us but don't know how to say it in English. We're lucky to be gaining another bilingual Korean teacher to help us with some of the 'lost in translation' issues (her English seems to be excellent).

I'm going to cut this one off now as it's time for the students to get ready to go and parents are arriving... we'll have pictures and more updates probably this weekend.

Chris