Mom & Dad-
We finally have an apartment! It took a couple of days, but we finally moved out of our school director's house and into our new digs. We're on the other side of the Han river from town (un-ideal) but it's a pretty short walk into town (ok). Also, we have a car (we haven't driven yet), so we should manage. The apartment isn't the small, modern pod that we had envisioned. It's pretty huge--two bedrooms, full kitchen, big pantry area--and slightly shabby--linoleum 'wood floors' and faded yellow flower print wallpaper. It needs work, but we'll make it work.
A couple of teachers had been staying here for the month before we arrived. One left last night and the other will be around until Friday. We observed their classes yesterday. The school is in downtown Yeoju. Teaching is pretty fast paced (45 minute classes all day) but is pretty straightforward and I think we'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. The classes are small (5 to 10 kids mostly) so they're manageable. The kids are a trip, but they defer to authority so managing the chaos doesn't look like it'll be too much of a problem.
Yeoju is....we're still trying to figure that out. It's more rural than we expected. The town center has places to go and things to do at night (restaurants, bars, BATTING CAGES!) but it's smaller than we hoped. We're going to need to get into the countryside (the car will help and there are fun things around--observatory, hot springs, hiking...) and get into Seoul (70 minutes on a bus and dirt cheap) in order to stay interested, but we think it's doable.
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Hi Mom and Dad-
I have to be pretty quick because Kate is (just a little bit) sick in bed and I promised her that I'd get into bed with her to watch a movie tonight. But a lot has happened in the last week and you haven't heard anything from me. To be honest, we've been super busy. And when we weren't busy, we were busy being exhausted, so processing everything that's happened and turning it into an email has been hard to do.
But, briefly, here's what the past week has been like:
We taught our first classes this week. The curriculum is about to change, but this week we each taught seven 45 minute classes of students from the lower elementary to middle school levels. We worked with a temporary American teacher at the school to develop our lesson plans. They are conversation classes, so it's mostly a whole lot of saying, repeating and then using the words and phrases we learn in a game or fun activity so that the students have to think on their toes and interact with each other in English. Our classes range in size from just four to twelve, but most are just about in the middle.
Starting next week our classroom time will be a lot different. We've been asked to develop a brand new Kindergarten curriculum which we'll spend about half the day teaching....But the teaching itself is bizarre, fun and unexpectedly exhilarating. It's totally exhausting and I'll have to save a description of the experience for another time. But I like it.
Yeoju is still pretty small. There are about 25 foreign teachers here. Most of them are still out of town on public school vacation, but we've met a few folks....
In the meantime, we're slowly making our apartment home...The teachers who lived here before us left a lot of stuff behind, so it took some work to turn the apartment into a clean slate, but the kitchen makes more sense (and is clean!) and our second bedroom is an office/recreation space.
It's all coming together slowly. I think that we're learning that we are a lot more resilient than we gave ourselves credit for, especially when we lived in DC. The first few days were tough, but we did finally get over that hump that we couldn't deal with a few years ago when San Francisco was hard. We're a lot more growed up :-) And we have jobs!
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And Kate is feeling better today.
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