July 13, First day of class

So I woke up today at about 5 am and thank god the rain had finally stopped and since this was the first day I had to report to work I was quite relieved. Our daily morning meeting at 8:30 where all teachers come together to discuss the day's activities went quite well. I had to stand up and introduce myself for a few minutes and I was met with a warm welcome and I have found that everyone here is super nice. Originally I was supposed to only be observing a class on my first day but I was instead thrown into a class with a Korean teaching partner Jasmine (Kim Ji-Hyang). Although English is not used at the school for instruction many of the classes will have both a native Korean and English speaking teacher in the classroom in order to make the younger children more comfertable. Today we were paired up with students who were only coming to the village for a one day field trip, although some (mostly university students or adults) are here for as long as a month.

The class we were assigned to teach for the day was titled Internet Mission, which emphasized the use of using English while surfing the internet and we stressed avoiding all use of Korean in completing the assignment. Throughout a four hour period we would be working with three different groups of students which rotated around the other 'theme' classes. Working mostly with google we taught students various ways to use English keywords in finding out information, images, and locations, and shopping with Amazon on the internet. We taught the same class three times and by the third class I had taken over the class as the lead teacher as I felt very comfortable in doing so. Below is a picture of the computer lab we worked in.



The kids we had we a riot and many of them were very scared to talk to me as they mostly would only say hi and giggle at me, which was hilarious, but they were always ready for a picture.



Before they left I was told each group wanted to take a picture with me so I had to oblidge. On the right was one of the other foreign teachers from South Africa.



Tomorrow I am not totally sure what I will be doing in the morning but I have already been told I will be proctoring a listening exam in the afternoon with a Korean-American girl from San Jose I have met named Carrol.

Till next time...