Teacher, Teacher

I've been continuing to enjoy teaching. It's been a fun and rewarding job teaching English at an elementary level while still having time to discover a new city and country.

The lesson planning is a serious part of the job, and its nice to have my co-teachers help out on that. We will usually put our ideas together and create the lesson plans as a team. As for the students; there are so many different unique personalities that the children have. It's been great getting to know them all as best as I can. There is a third grade class that will always follow me back to my office and just hang around saying 'goodbye, goodbye'; its too cute. And one fourth grader will always tell me how smart she in a very funny and light manner. "I'm very smart, don't you think so, don't you?" Of course I just kindly laugh and agree.

The sixth graders are about to graduate elementary school in December; they will move on to middle school in January. I asked one sixth grader if he was excited about moving on and he told me he was not looking forward to the extra homework. Anyways, they are not as excited about English as the third graders are, needless to say. But Korea is a country who places an extremely high value on quality education, so many students will spend many hours after public school in private institutions studying various subjects. One third grader I know is taking about 5 different after school classes. Korea has one of the strongest economies in the world despite its relatively small size and population because of their focus on finding quality education.

So the moral: study hard.
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On my free time I am starting to pick up some of my older hobbies along with making some new ones. I've been spending some time at Seoul's biggest electronic market, Yongsan, trying to find cheap, but quality, parts to upgrade my computer along with trying to make some music. Also, I plan by late March to have a website of my own up, but I will still have a link to this blog on it.