"Un Año Mas" -Mecano

So I was talking with my coteacher, Mr. Lee, and he was talking about how a year had already gone by. I explained how I know I’m getting older, but I don’t feel like I’m getting older. It’s like time is passing by but at times I feel like I’m still seventeen. So I can’t process some of the things I’ve done. I sometimes can’t believe high school is already over for me, let alone having my degrees and spending a year of my life overseas.
A year ago I was excited about the following three major things...






Pati & Nick’s Wedding in May 2010:


My Master’s Graduation (and the passing of my COMPS) in May 2010:

Celebrating that I graduated and agreed to teach for a year in South Korea:

Today, at the end of May 2011, I’m now excited about the three following things:

Going to vacation in Hawaii

Going back to Los Angeles to be amongst my home friends and family

Starting a new job that will challenge me in new ways (I love learning)

Things come full circle I suppose, time for another cycle.

p.s. Seems like yesterday I was keeping me having been offered the job in Korea a secret from my friends because I wanted to wait for the wedding to be over. I’m not a thunder stealer.

Top 5

Today’s entry was inspired by one Miss Lauren (from: http://laurenseoulsearching.blogspot.com/). During my bon voyage dinner with my friends in South Korea, she told me that my assignment by the end of the night was to give her the top five things I won’t miss from South Korea and the top five things I will miss from South Korea.

So here we go, the top 5 things I won’t miss from South Korea:
1. The way the shower plumbing system is set up in the majority of apartments
2. The way trash on the street in handled
3. The extra syllable added to everything
4. Small tin cups of water (I consume like 80 of those a day)
5. A side of pickles with everything you order (and not the good kind)

However, every cloud has a silver lining, so in keeping a positive perspective on the last year, here are the top 5 things I will miss about South Korea:
1. Being called handsome so many times (throughout the course of a single day)
2. I like learning something new everyday, especially things that Osc from a year ago wouldn't think he could do
3. No need to worry about lunch at work
4. This is my easiest commute ever
5. The friends I've made

There you have it. Great task to complete, kudos Lauren.

As an added bonus, because this was my last dinner with the majority of my SK friends, here's our recreation of the Last Supper (Stephanie is clearly playing the role of Judas).

“it's a world of laughter, a world of tears, it's a world of hopes, it's a world of fear”

Sports Day

Well Korea doesn’t really have high school sports teams the way the US does. I was in the tennis team, and of course I had friends that played an array of sports as teens: soccer, basketball, football, etc. However, Korea does have PE classes with PE uniforms not unlike back home. But in order to commemorate students who excel in specialized sports, schools all over Korea have a Sports Day. Sports Day at my school is a two day event that includes a whole wide range of events so that every student can participate in something: soccer, relay races, three-legged races, dodge ball, and basketball. Here go another English teacher at my school, Heidi, and I with some students cheering on the teams:

This was my favorite shot from the whole event, the second grade relay race winner’s photo finish:

Can I just say that for a day that promotes physical activity, I’ve never eaten so much in my life? The parents contribute a lot to this event, food and their time. They buy the students A LOT of food: burgers, pizzas, ice cream, sodas, Gatorade, cookies, and any other foods that represent the polar-opposite of a sports day. Luckily, that basketball game I played helped burn off some (but definitely not all) of those delicious calories.

Everland

Something I really wanted to scratch off my Korea “bucket list” was going to an amusement park here.
I finally got the chance to go to Everland, about 40 minutes away from the Suwon station. It’s really convenient to get there too because there’s a shuttle that leaves every 30 minutes from the Suwon station (starting at 9am) to take people to Everland. I doubt we have anything like that for Disneyland back home. In typical theme park fashion it had its signature rollercoast, but my favorite was one in the rock and roll park that spun you in ways you wouldn’t expect. Here’s a picture from that ride:

All in all it was a lot of fun and Korean theme parks are reasonably priced with reasonably priced concessions (unlike theme parks at movie theaters back home). It was about $30 USD for admission at we had a good restaurant lunch for about $18. Also, Everland has many animal displays so we got to see tiny foxes, monkeys, sheep, tigers, seals, polar bears, skunks, and rabbits.

I think we were all surprised to see so many waygooks (foreigners) working in the theme park’s shows. Here we are with some of the performers after the show:

Speech Exam Week
So I am currently wrapping up my second to last week in Korea and it is currently speech exam week. This is the week I’ve also decided to let students know of my plans for departure. The big gasps of reactions I get each time make me appreciate my time here even more. The speeches have gone by well, and especially today, they really studied. The theme is what they would do if they only had a month to live. A lot of the responses are universal like spending more time with friends and family, writing thank you letters and donating their organs. Some are original, like one student would try to die a day before his diagnosis in order to prove doctors wrong, another said he would eat a long list of foods so he could die from overeating, while another noted that she would marry her boyfriend and travel the world.
I have one student though who is painfully shy. She couldn’t go through with her speech and cried in front of everyone. My co-teacher also told me later on that she also missed school the day following the exam. All I hope is that she’s well and that her classmates’ extrovert personalities rub off on her. Learning experience? Never being shy, and never having to come out of my shell because my shell has always been nonexistent, I can’t completely relate to reaching a level timidity where I would freeze, but I do have sympathy for all my students.

So here I am, another round of speech exams on the way from my second graders, the most seasoned of my students and the most prepared, so I’m looking forward to what they have to say. More blogging to come later...

Smarticles

I’ve heard this theory before and I completely agree, the way you can tell if your child is going to be smart is if they enjoy the company of adults. Allow me to explain. I read a study sometime ago (probably in grad school) and it has come up in conversations that children who get classified as gifted enjoy the company of adults rather than peers their own age.

This stems from something very simple: thinking kids your age are too childish and immature. From my own experience I can say I fully agree. I grew up with a sister five years my elder and we got along great. I really enjoyed her company, and I would hang on to every word teachers would say in hopes that I could be as eloquent as they were one day (most of the time) and I just thought adults were overall better people. I couldn’t wait to grow up, but yet again, who can’t? But it made me want to read more, know more about the world, and explore life outside of school so that I could hold conversations of substance with them in hopes that they would see me as their equal. Let’s fast forward now to high school. I still felt adults were better, and I still couldn’t relate to the average fifteen year old. Granted, I went to a magnet school in which I had the majority of my classes with students who had proven to be smart and all the friends I made were college-bound. I could definitely relate to them, so it’s not like I ever isolated myself from my age group seeing how we were “mini-adults.” In my high school program, our core classes were taken within the magnet school and we had to take electives from the regular high school. So in observing how the other students interacted, my friends and I always had our side commentaries as to how they conducted themselves and how at times there was a level of immaturity we couldn’t relate to. However, that’s not a blanket statement because that can’t be said about everyone; I definitely met a good amount of exceptions. But I digress, I think a big part of why I did pretty well for myself was because I had that mentality even at a young age.

Now there’s my brother. My brother is eight years younger than I am, which means my sister and him have a wide thirteen year gap in between them. My brother, being the youngest amongst my siblings, had no one but older people surrounding him. He had cousins his own age, but he only really interacted with adults on a daily basis. He also could not relate with kids his own age because he would view the world, even as a young age, that he could do better things with his time than play childish games like learn languages, learn about the world, and reach his potential. He did so exceptionally well for himself leaving middle school with a flawless 4.0 GPA and graduating high school with honors. Now as an adult, I think he’s content at a level I was when I reached that facet of my life.

Now we fast forward to my niece. She is a kindergarten student, and you may think it’s too early to tell how she’ll turn out. It’s not. Now being in a mostly “only child” situation, she’s had no choice but to interact with people who are nothing but grown-ups in her eyes. Kids will still be kids and she does enjoy playing with peers, but she also enjoys being challenged. I remember when that little girl was three and could work a DVD player like it was second nature. And then she would get entranced in my brother’s Nintendo DS, which made her require her own at some point. Her curiosity had also led her in learning much about reading before going into school, similar to how I was taught before stepping foot into a kindergarten classroom. Because of this, and because there’s nothing but adults who are looking to her to strive, she became the “student of the month” the first month of her school year. This was based on the fact that she learned all her sight words for the semester in about three weeks. She’ll now be enrolled in a gifted program in her elementary school, so the pattern continues.

The idea to blog about this came about a dinner I was having with fellow teachers here in Korea and thinking, “being an adult and talking about anything and everything rocks!”