Updating the ol Blog

two years ago the Blog was the new phenomenon. now it's facebook. kinda nice to see pictures and gets a bit of info and insight into everyone's lives, but very sad because it's usually quite short and not too informative.

so i'm gonna try to do the blog again. after all, why should the first year of korea get soooo many entries and the second get none?! we are living a completely different year than last in the same country, living in a new city, new apartment, working new jobs, worshipping at a new church, seeing some great new places, and meeting some really great new people. of course we're thankful that we still have our 'old' friends, Rachel and Robin here for most of the summer. will be a sad day when they leave.

We did not sign the contract to stay on at our little after school academy in little Iksan. We made the plunge to a bigger city, the capital of our province Jeollabukdo into Jeonju. you can see some info about the city here known mainly for hanji paper.

We are working with the public school board. We were hired the Jeollabukdo Office of Education and now more specifically the Jeonju Office of Education. We work day time hours (8:30-4:30, but most often we're finished earlier!) in 5 different middle schools each. So every Monday we teach at a school, every Tuesday we teach at a school, etc...until we've taught at the same 5 schools every week. So there is LOTS AND LOTS of variey this year, which has made the year go by extremely fast.

In most of our schools there are 8-14 different second grade middle school classes that we teach. so we end up teaching in each classroom about once a month. not produtive for the students' progress, but they do have English lessons almost every day, just once a month with the foreigner. There are 38 students per class on average, so that's approximately 1 minute/month/student to have a conversation with us. On average we see 500 students a week totalling almost 2,000 students a month!! WOW! yeah, that's really a lot when you put it down on paper.

no, i have not memorized their names.

actually, i don't know 1 students' name. We never have to do a report on their progress or talk to a parent. we are 'in-and-out' kind of teachers. get in, teach the lesson, be interesting, make the students speak english, and get out! not in a bad way though. we are supposed to 'team-teach' with our Korean teachers, but this happens with about 3 of 20 teachers each. It's nearly impossible to sit down with a teacher and explain the lesson and ask for their help in certain situations before class. So we pretty much teach the lessons on our own and our teachers help discipline and keep students on task.
and you know what?

we pretty much really, really enjoy our jobs!

more later...off to class!