Graduation

It was Graduation for the kindergartens on Friday. There are 22 moving up to elementary school leaving a big gap in our the morning program. Stella, our kindergarten co-ordinator, is leaving for the States to study English with her husband, so we are left with Ellie as the only Korean kindergarten teacher. We won't have enough kindergartens in the morning to fill Stella's spot. But good news for us. We are going down to 4-30 min classes in the morning, instead of the 4-40 min classes we used to teach. Those 10 minutes makes all the difference in the world when dealing with 6 year olds. *more grad pictures soon*


Parents and their cameras

With their diplomas

Jei & Craig

Sunny & Sally - off to China for 3 years

Brown class & Stella

Look Into My Crystal Ball

The 2nd floor is a little slow at taking down the Xmas decorations

An American's Guide to Canada

Ran across this site: American's Guide of Canada. Figured I'd put it in, since it's Gabe's and Dave's last couple of days here. So this is for Dave; for the time he came in wearing a tuque, and when I mentioned it, he looked all over his body and exclaimed, "What the hell's a tuque!?!"

In Canada they say:/In the States they say:

Grade x/xth grade

Write a test/Take a test

Marks/Grades

Essay/Paper

Public School/Elementary School

Supply teacher/Substitute teacher

College/Community College

University/4-year, degree-granting college or university

Residence/Dormitory

Coles Notes/Cliff Notes

skipping/cutting class

chocolate bar/candy bar

homo milk/whole milk

icing sugar/powdered sugar

housecoat/bathrobe

elastic/rubber band

knapsack/book bag

Check out the site for more. I found it interesting to read it through the eyes of an American.

Science with Cornell

My last science class with this year's Cornell. They were pretending to take pictures of me as I was taking pictures of them: "Smile" - "Kimchi"

Tommy

No eyes, no ears...

Angela

"Kimchi"

IIII

So, today Gabe shows us his new watch from his girlfriend. And we're looking at it - Roman numerals, very nice, la la la . Then, we notice - IIII. Last time I checked, 4 was IV. Who would make thousands of these without looking into the Roman numeral system first? Yeah Korea! Oh well, it's good for a laugh. And a picture.

Don't Sleep

Craig and I were at Carrefore today (it's no E-Mart in Madu, Matt, but it's not Walmart), and we found this gum in the candy section. "Don't Sleep" gum. We liked the little car picture up at the top. I'm assuming they're claiming this gum won't let you fall asleep while driving. That's a big promise from 2 little black chicklets. Turns out the gum is like Dentyne's Midnight Mint gum. Really strong and really (in my opinion) gross. No caffeine laced gum here....

Lake Park

Went for a walk around Lake Park today (still no snow in Ilsan). Craig took some pictures along the way.

Kindergarten Concert

Kindergarten Concert

Yesterday we had our end of the school year kindergarten concert for all the parents. It's been a long month preparing, practicing, making props for this one evening. It wasn't at the school; we were bused over to a hall/building within the city for the performance. Unfortunately there were no dressing rooms for the kids, so between scenes we had to strip 30 kids down to their underwear in the hall and change them into their costumes. It turned out to be a success, but we were more than tired after that day....and more than happy for the concert to be over with.

Here's Craig's photos.

Tall Tales

I finally bought Royal Wood's full length debut, Tall Tales CD - I've loved his piano since The Milkweed - Tall Tales didn't come out until after I left for Korea. When I received it (thanks mom), I realized that Valery Gore had done background vocals for some of the songs. Another RCBHS graduate who escaped the small town life.... supposedly coming out with a CD of her own. And today I taught a bunch of 7 year olds how to make a moving turtle out of a paper cup, an elastic band and rubber clay.

*sigh*

Well, at least I have my Royal Wood CD to comfort me as I type up these report cards.

Survived North Korea

It's been a looooong day! Up at 4:30a.m. and on the subway by 5:30; destination - USO Camp Kim to begin our tour of the Korean D.M.Z.. With a bus load of foreigners, we proceeded to the DMZ with our korean tour guide - John. We hit up three major places: Panmunjeom, Third Tunnel, and an Observation point, and a few stops in between.

At Panmunjeom, we went into the MAC building which has one half in each country - so we crossed the room and were in North Korea; unfortunately they don't stamp your passport. This room is where all negotiations take place and it's been in a few movies - it's quite famous. The tour guide told us an amusing story: when President George W. Bush visited the area, he was in the building and several North Koreans entered, took the silk American flag off the wall and polishd their shoes with it. The flags were replaced with hard plastic flags in a frame.

The Propaganda Village is called so because it used to broadcast propaganda over loud speakers towards South Korea, hoping to get some people to defect - yeah right! The village is actually empty, there isn't even glass over the windows. Some caretakers turn on and off lights to make it seem populated. In the middle of the 'village' there's a huge flag pole with the largest flag in the world on top. The flag itself is 31 meters long and weighs 600lbs dry! There wasn't enough wind to pick it up. Both sides have a flag pole; at one time, the South Koreans built a large pole, 100 meters tall, and North Korea responded with a 160 meter one. Talk about compensating...a similar battle of size occurred with this building (not the blue building). It used to be two stories tall until South Korea built a large reunion building opposite it. Unfortunately, the building has never been used to reunite split families since the North fears defection.

The Third Tunnel was really neat, but we weren't allowed to take pictures :( It's a good haul back up the tunnel; here's Mary, exhausted at the top. Actually, we weren't allowed to take pictures in many places for supposed security reasons. This photo line at the Observatory shows how strict they were and even when behind the line, you couldn't take pictures to the south.

The whole tour was definitely worth the $40. We got back to Seoul at 3:30p.m. Maybe we'll go back when things get greener.

View a slide show of the photos.

Grammar, blah....

My grammar knowledge is horrible.

It's limited to the days of Stevensville Public School when the last thing I wanted to learn was what the superlative of a word or a reflexive pronoun was. But that lack of knowledge became my worst enemy when coming here.

Last month I was chosen to work one on one with a girl who was in need of being taught advanced level grammar (bad choice on teacher, Mrs Jang). Anyway, I found myself learning English grammar along with her and realized how much I didn't know about the background and rules of, sadly, my native language.

I signed up for an online TEFL course that emphasized grammar. I regretted taking it at first - cause it's work, and work just isn't fun. But now I'm more than happy that I'm taking it; it'll make my last 6 months of teaching a whole lot easier.

And now when a student asks me a question about grammar, I'll be able to give a answer that's more reasonable than, "um.. English is just really tricky, ok?"

Happy New Year!

It's Lunar New Year here in Korea. The 3 day holiday is normally attached to a weekend, giving us 5 days off, but it works out this year that we only get off Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Most schools are giving their teachers either the Monday or Friday off so they can have a long break, but.... not Swaton. Have to work the Monday and Friday *sigh*. But, 3 days off is 3 days off, so maybe we'll do some more exploring in Seoul since no one will be in the city during the holiday, or maybe the DMZ - haven't been there yet.

Rumour has it that Dave and Gabe are going to be replaced with a British couple from London. They've taught in Korea before, and they want to come back to teach. They're coming sooner than we thought. Since the new school year starts in March, Mrs Jang's going to let Dave & Gabe go sooner than the 6 weeks they requested to bring the new teachers in for the new school year.

Craig and I got rid of the TV in December since we didn't get any stations worth watching and to free up some space in the living room. But as the months went by TV-less, I realized I hadn't seen a new (non-Korean or non-Korean-dubbed) movie since Gabe begged us to watch Mystic River months ago. So Craig and I made it a movie weekend and watched Lost in Translation (thoroughly enjoyed, maybe even more so since I'm in Korea now), Napoleon Dynamite (one of the dumbest, yet most entertaining movies I've seen in a long time), Sex is Comedy and the first 4 episodes of 3rd season 24 (help me, I'm addicted once again). Besides watching more 24 (I love you Tony Almeida), I should be set for another 3 months. However, I probably should take advantage of the $1 DVD rentals here more often, so if there's a movie I shouldn't miss, let me know.

63 Building

63 Building

Dave, Craig & I took a trip into Seoul and checked out the tallest building: 63 Building (yes, the Koreans were original when coming up with a name for this 63 floor building). There's an observation deck on the top floor and below the main level, there's an aquarium and IMAX theatre. We checked all three things out. To look at Seoul from above was quite amazing. Amazing that so many people are stuffed into such a small area.

Here's Craig's photos.

Flat Stanley & the Times

(click to enlarge)

Mom's grade 3 class had just finished reading the children's book Flat Stanley and one of the activities was to make a big Flat Stanley and send him across the country or world. Mom sent it to me along with the book to show my kindergartens. We hung up Flat Stanley and took a picture to send home. She also sent a copy of the Fort Erie times - so for you avid Fort Erie Times readers, you may see our smiling faces on page six in the editorial section soon. Haha. Dave wanted to be in it; he didn't want to miss a chance at being in a small town Canadian newspaper ... also this may be the only picture I have of all 4 Upenn's smiling. Three missons completed in one picture - it was a successful morning.

Oh Buffalo...

I finally can say I'm back to a point where I can run with ease; but logging more weekly miles than I have fingers and toes has brought a little soreness in the morning, so I've been reading into how to keep injury-free while training. Runner's World has been a great source of information. When looking up worldwide "on the road" running destinations, Buffalo came up as one of the cities recommended to run in. I had to laugh; Buffalo was where I spent a good majority of my latter teen life, training for rowing. I ran many of the routes which were mentioned in the article. Many many many times. 17 years old, running to Lake Erie Basin Marina's lighthouse, back through LaSalle Park, trying to sneak a peek at the lastest Ani DiFranco concert being set up; having to run in groups due to the scary people lurking around LaSalle......

So:

Worldwide running destination: Buffalo (complete)

77 more to go...

And then there were two...

Dave and Gabe put their 6 weeks in yesterday. Dave's pretty much sick of Korea and Gabe's very much sick of Swaton. They didn't plan on resigning at the same time (Gabe didn't even know Dave was even thinking of leaving) but now it opens up a lot of questions for the next 6 months. Who will Mrs Jang hire? Will she only hire 1 person due to the lack of kids signing up? Either way, it'll be a very interesting next month.