My Students

My students broke a window in the main office today, last week they set one of the classrooms on fire. If you're coming to Korea to teach, avoid the all boys schools unless you know what you're getting into.

School

It's winter vacation and I'm stuck in school, so are the students.

It is officially winter vacation and despite that they still have mandatory extra classes that the students have to attend. I don't have to teach any of these classes but I'm still expected to show up. This has given me a lot of free time and so I've been taking the opportunity to walk around the neighborhood and I've seen and tasted a couple of interesting things.

Yesterday, I saw a truck back up to what I'm fairly sure is a restaurant. This truck had metal boxes in the back of it and after a short amount of time, the driver opened one of these boxes up and pulled out a live dog which was then led into the restaurant. Guess I know what they serve there.

Today I got lunch at a small restaurant (not the dog place) and as I ate my meal, I saw a lot of my students come up and order what appeared to be corndogs from a large open window that covered the front of the shop. After finishing my meal, I ordered one of the 'corndogs' to eat on my walk back to school. The guy selected one of the larger ones he'd cooked and asked if I wanted him to put on what I assumed was salt, I agreed and he handed me my snack. All I have to say about the meal is that sugar and mustard do not go together, I still have the aftertaste in my mouth and it's vile.

Purple Haze

Staying home and doing laundry this weekend so I don't think I'll have any new pics of Seoul. It's finals week at my high school so my duties are to sit at my desk and hang out until it's time to leave. I have three days of classes next week and maybe a class or two after that, then it's winter vacation which will consist of going into school and sitting around till it's time to go. May or may not have an English camp I have to do, leaning towards may not because no one has told me I have to do one and it's getting fairly late in the game.

'Free' on-line TESOL course

That's right folks, a free TESOL course through TESOL Global, well for certain values of free anyway. It looks like they've posted their entire course online for perusal, if you want a certificate then you gotta pay for it. Price seems to be fairly reasonable at 81 USD and they claim that it will get you the extra cash from the Korean Government. I've decided to give it a try and I will be sure to post my experiences.

I don't know much about TESOL Global. They're affiliated in some way with the Asian EFL Journal which is where I learned about the above course.

Movie Week

So I decided to show my class a movie this week. Went to the local Home Plus and looked over the discount rack. To make a long story short, I picked up 'Charlie Wilson's War' and popped it in.

For those of you that have never seen it before, 'Charlie Wilson's War' contains quite a bit of nudity in the first few minutes of the movie. The students loved it, the Korean co-teacher was not happy.

Lesson Learned, don't show movies that you haven't watched first.

Such is life I suppose

On Teaching

Some people like to either give their students, or allow their students to pick English names. I think this is a bad idea for the following three reasons.

One: They'll expect you to remember their names. I have almost two thousand students, the most I see them is once a week.

Two: You'll have two hundred 'Harry Potters' and another hundred assorted names.

Three: They types of names that have cropped up in a guy I knows' class include; Adolf Hitler, Rapist, SEXOR, etc. While amusing to hear a ten to seventeen year old say some of these things, it still isn't worth remembering them all.

A girl I know said something about bringing up their colonialist past when the Japanese would assign new names to people in places and how she didn't want to be seen as an outsider who came and reopened all those old wounds. Me, I doubt that my students would have any clue about any of that.

School

I work at a Boy's High School in Incheon. My students act the way you'd expect a group of teenage boys to act after being cooped up all day, they're animals. Misbehave, sleep in class, talk loudly to each other in Korea, etc. On the flip side, I have a lot of power as a teacher. The kinds of punishments that I can give would get me fired and possibly imprisoned in the United States so I guess it's a trade off. Fair warning, if you are planning to come to Korea to work then expect to see things that may make some people uncomfortable.

On the lighter side, my school sits right next to an Elementary School and one of the bathrooms has windows facing the Elementary School so a couple of their classrooms can look down and watch me urniate. I'd post photos, but I can't think of a way to explain what I was doing if I got caught.