friday nite was an interesting nite. all the staff at our school went out to dinner after work. yum yum barbecue pork. then we headed to a bar after that for lots of drinking games. and then to a noraebang for karaoke. good times. i got home around 2:30. here's some pics.

i had to grade book reports for all my kids and i thought i would share some of what they wrote. the book reports are worksheets they have to print out and do and the activities they have to do are different depending on the book they read. anyways, here's a taste:

good night my fish in the fishbowl

good night my snail in the snail house

good night my doll on the bed

good night moon

see you next day night.

One day, during trip, Lion met shark.

They came from different zoo, And they want to new nice worlds.

They trips the sea and the island.

They eat food and play with together.

And They decided to live together.

It is not zoo. It's where the woods and sea met.

dog and bird are Playing in the land and the dog win so bird was sad.

The cat and fish was friend and they was friend but cat lives on island and fish live on ocean and cat teach how to mack hot and cat teach to clam and cat go to the sea and they live happly the end

Dear racoon

I would like you to take the racoon to zoo because it is too smelly.

Sincerely, Farmer Brown

cat and rabbit are goodboys.

Dog and turtle are reading a books.

Cat and rabbit came to read a book.

They are reading a book.

Dog and turtle like to drink water.

Turtle says, "Could you help me to drink water? Because I don't have my hands."

Cat and rabbit help to drink the water for turtle.

Duck and crocodile

Duck eat the food.

Crocodile see Duck.

crocodile eat 1 egg.

crocodile eat 2 egg.

crocodile eat 3 egg.

crocodile eat Duck.

volcano and the animals

The four animals are sleeping.

The ground is shaking.

"oh, no! The volcano is blow up."

The animals wake up.

They run and run and run.

And the four animals is safe.

The Elephant and penguin

The elephant helped a penguin who tried to cross the river in the jungle.

On his way back to the store Preston stopped by the park to play when suddenly the little bard's dung got in his mouth. He jump up crazy.

Cow has huge. Cow offers many milk.

Cat likes fish. cat has whiskers.

pig likes eat. pig likes to pink sponge nose.

dog is cute. dog has 4 legs.

tiger stripes make body and 4 legs and long tail.

Horse runs fast. Horse likes carrot to munch.

Preston was walk down the street sining a song and fart. Suddenly, The monster comes and said i will eat you.

i put up some pics of the school here.

well it seems that most everything crazy or bad seems to happen in my classes. first a kid showed me his willy when he was asking to go to the bathroom, another kid flicked off some other students and said the f word, other kids have said bad words in korean to the other kids and i find out after the fact, and today two girls in my atlas class (the lowest level) decided to fight each other. i was walking around checking their homework and they were supposed to be working on a review worksheet i gave them. they were all talking a little in korean, which is what they do a lot of in that class. and one girl starting yelling at another girl and i had to keep telling her not to yell, and when i was on the opposite side of the table, she decided to launch at another girl two chairs over from her. they ended up slapping each other and pulling each other's hair. i had to pry the one off the other and take her out of the classroom. i took the other one out too separately. it was freaking crazy. i was shaking afterwards. eek. 

so i found the soundtrack to jersey boys online, and i have it blaring right now. yay for dancing around my apartment singing (or croaking) can't take my eyes off of you! hehe, my neighbors must think i'm nuts. but i don't care.

today i used my penguin in class - the kids passed him around when it was their turn to read. and then one kid started choking penguin! i was not happy about that. 

another thing that i haven't really gotten used to here is the way "westerners," especially around my building cause a lot of english teachers live here, decide to strike up a conversation with me just cause i'm a fellow "westerner," i.e. obviously an english teacher too. i mean whenever i see someone who isn't korean i just kind of smile or nod if they look in my direction cause they always seem to want recognition that we are the fellow oddballs in the vicinity or whatever. but often people decide to start talking to me, as if we already know each other. hayley and i have talked about this, and it's just a bit weird to both of us. it happened again today as i was walking to the grocery store. this guy saw me and was like "hey! are you an english teacher?!" yep. whoo.

today i played real scrabble at cindy's, as in not online scrabble. i much prefer it online cause it tells me whether something is a word or not, hehe. but i think i did ok. 

i took some pics of my money and the kid's artwork in two of my classes. just click here for the album. 

today has been very laid back. i slept in, i laid around, didn't use my voice much. it's slowly coming back, whoo. i watched a lot of peep show too, a british comedy. cindy gave me the dvds of all the seasons so i've been making my way thru it. i did venture out to get pizza with cindy though, yay for pizza school. i felt very productive in the afternoon too. i cleaned up my apartment some and organized things, and i did laundry for the first time. i was really worried i would do something wrong cause all the buttons are in korean and i wasn't sure how much powder & fabric softner to put in, but the clothes seemed fine once it finished. luckily anna had already told me which buttons to push too when i showed her pics of the washing machine buttons, heh. it takes forever though, an hour & a half cause it's a front loader. 

i remembered something my atlas kids said a few days ago (they are my lowest level class). i showed them a picture of a diamond, and they said . . . bling! haha. cracked me up. 

i've pretty much gotten used to the whole not being able to read anything around me (like signs, instructions, bills, etc.) and having to look for food at the grocery store with pictures on it or with some English words.

but i have not gotten used to being stared at. it doesn't happen all the time, but i can't believe how many times i've been on the subway and someone just inches away from me just STARES. and i don't even have hayley's "crazy" blue eyes, heh. it's like they're trying to figure me out by examining me, without blinking. 

the week is over and i couldn't be happier. my voice has been dead for the past couple days, so teaching has been a huge struggle, especially in classes where i really need my voice to keep the kids attention. i've had some rough classes, but i made it thru. 

today our director also observed one of my classes. eek. it didn't help matters when i starting coughing a couple times and couldn't stop. such a hard class to get through. but that class was actually better behaved this time since she was sitting in the back watching everything, heh. but of course she sat in on the only class were i went into a coughing fit. she gave me feedback too at the end of the day, which was helpful. i think i did an ok job, and i'm slowly learning things that work and don't work. i totally stole a game idea from hayley that worked really well today - having the kids make two lines in front of the board and having a spelling contest between the two teams. whoo. 

today i got a package from brian/mom. yay! i was most excited to have my bookbag. i definitely need it for all my crap i take to school. and yay for reese's! if anyone wants to send me m&m's too, i would greatly appreciate it, hehe. 

i'm going to try to take more pics this coming week and next weekend i'll probably venture out more once i'm back to normal, so hopefully i can take more. 

today i also opened a bank account, quite the experience. i was so happy to have one of our TAs with me to talk to the teller and explain what i wanted. much easier than me trying to mime things. and now i have a bank account! as of right now it's empty, but my first pay should be coming soon. whoo. then i'm definitely going to do some shopping. 2001 outlet here i come!

it's st. patrick's day! . . . and i'm sick :( my nose hates me right now, and it is impolite here to blow your nose in public, so i try to do it quiet at least when i can't hide somewhere. i guess it's fine to burp though to show appreciation for your food. 

i remembered a random question a lil girl asked me . . . what are dogs like? we were doing a lesson that involved dogs and one of the girls at the front asked me that. i was like um . . . they're friendly, and they like to fetch, heh. that's all i could come up with. 

yesterday a girl also asked me if i was from canada. i guess she was born in boston in the u.s., and she kept asking me questions about the u.s. while i was trying to do the lesson. 

well i'm hoping today goes by really quick. i only have 4 classes so it shouldn't be too bad. i just have to keep the kids under control. then plan for tomorrow, and go home and crash. whoo.

i am super sick, i have been since saturday morning when i woke up with a really bad sore throat. but today actually went better than i thought it would. i yelled at my really bad class first thing - told them about writing their names on the board and if i got to 3 warnings they were going to go talk to annie, our director (or principal). so they shut up for most of the time and listened to me after that.

so i thought it was bad being sick, but poor teresa (one of the teachers from new zealand) has it way worse. her water in her apartment has been shut off twice - the second time from friday til now. and there's a lot of damage in her place from the previous person who had a cat, and her apartment even smells like cat. it's super gross. poor girl. she's been really frustrated and i can't believe more hasn't been done. she's brought it up a lot and things aren't really getting anywhere. eek. 

anyways, sunday when i was at the cafe across the street working on planning for monday, this guy randomly came up to me and asked where i was from and if i would be his private english tutor. i told him i'm way too busy plus avalon doesn't allow that, but he kept pushing and said he wanted me to come have dinner with his family and teach his 2 kids too. he kept asking where i lived, but i just said a couple blocks over. it was creeping me out. he wrote his name & number down on a napkin in case i changed my mind. weird. 

it's been a long weekend for me. i slept in sat, only to wake up with a really bad sore throat. so i've been taking it easy all weekend, just lying around and watching dvds. whoo that 70s show. i seriously wish i had internet in my apartment so i didn't have to go out to other places to get it, even just to send an email or whatever. 

saturday when i went out wandering around migeum with hayley we were asked if we believed in jesus christ by some random koreans. i was wondering if they were going to start preaching to us, but they just asked a couple questions then left. 

hayley and i also made a list of u.s. words vs. new zealand words cause we have been cracking up over the funny things each of us say. here it is:

hamburger vs. mince

trash vs. rubbish

elevator vs. lift

clean up vs. tidy up

candy vs. lolly or lollies

cough drops vs. cough lollies

fries vs. chips

cookie vs. biscuit

crap! vs. bugger!

pickle vs. gherkin

hot dog vs. sausage

convenience stores vs. dairies

bangs vs. fringe

tired vs. knaeckered

rain boots vs. gum boots

flip flops vs. jandals

sweater vs. jersey

freeway vs. motorway

pavement vs. footpath 

drinking (alcohol) vs. piss-up

eraser vs. rubber

go away vs. rack off and stuff off

talking to vs. rark up

sex vs. root (pronounced like route)

chug vs. scull

break vs. smoko

having a tantrum vs. spit the dummy

sweet potato vs. kumara

thanks vs. ta

make fun of someone vs. take the piss out of someone

white-out vs. twink

bathing suits vs. togs

preggers vs. up the duff

forever vs. yonks or donkey's years

z vs. zed

pharmacy vs. chemist

shopping cart vs. trolley

wilderness vs. forest

so, koreans don't so much believe in waiting their turn. for example, whenever i get off the subway, people are waiting right outside the door and walk right on in when the doors open, no matter how many people are trying to get off. same goes for the elevator . . . and most koreans stand right in front of the buttons so they can push the close door button as much as possible. the doors freaking shut on me today cause some guy pushed the button as i was trying to get on. bah. 

you also can't browse anything in stores without a korean salesperson coming up and trying to talk to you and show you things. and don't touch anything! or they'll think that you want it. 

The kids that come to our school know at least a little English, though the hard part is getting them to speak it - especially the lowest level classes. It's quite hard to get any English out of those levels. But the higher levels are pretty good about speaking English. My classes are mostly Language Arts - they read a lot of stories and we do questions about them to get them to write and speak, and I also teach them vocab in the process and some grammar. 

I'm having a real hard time getting some of the kids to listen to me because they just ignore me speaking English to them. I think I started out too easy too cause they pretty much walk all over me. Today was a pretty crappy day cause I had 3 really naughty classes who wouldn't listen to anything and just kept speaking in Korean. I really need to crack down on that, but today was just a losing battle trying to get thru everything. I think I'm going to start writing their names on the board when they're bad and putting checks next to them. Lindsey told me about that - 2 checks for warnings, and 3=call home, etc. We're starting a sticker reward system at school too. I guess I'll try a few things and see how it goes, but i can't handle any more classes like I had today. I'm exhausted after that. 

today i made one kid in my lowest level stand against the wall and i stood behind him so he couldn't move. it sorta worked, i almost made him do it again but then class was over. 

i think the school is going to come up with some kind of reward system to try to motivate the kids more. 

i see all the other teachers at school every day. we have a staff room where all the korean and native english teachers have desks. 5 of each, cause we have co-teachers. one korean to one native english teacher. we share classes sorta where i'll have one class of kids while my co-teacher has another, and then we switch classes and subjects. i do language arts mostly, with a little bit of science. 

we just eat lunch at our desks, we don't go out anywhere. i get food from a lil restaurant called starlite - it has sandwiches, salads, etc. i usually get a bagel and cream cheese cause i don't like a lot on my stomach before class.  we're all sorta on the same schedules - same hours, but different breaks. 

we don't really ride the subway to school together anymore since we all know how to get there on our own. i usually go in early too to work on lesson plans and printing flashcards for my classes. we make a lot of visuals to keep them interested. we mostly come up with games on our own but we kinda share what we're doing too with others. 

today went okay. my first class wears me out though - it's my lowest level class and they don't listen to me half the time. it's takes so much energy to get anything done. that's the class i made the kid stand against the wall. i was so fed up with all of them, i probably should've made all of them stand against the wall.  

hayley and i went back for our medical checks today, this morning. it went ok, but neither of us could pee! (for the urine test). it took forever for me to, and hayley barely did at all. we're wondering if we'll have to go back, but oh well. it was especially awkward cause they only had squatters. i felt like a lil kid in the woods. 

that picture with all of us was for todd's birthday (on facebook). teresa, hayley, anna, todd & me. go here for the album.

we're the 5 native english teachers at the sunae campus. though anna has it good cause she's australian but she's korean. i think she grew up in australia all her life, so she speaks both english and korean. it's funny, today we were talking about how she can hear the kids when they're talking about her in korean, heh. i wonder about that, how often the kids are talking about me. 

it's pretty funny, most of the cereal i can find around here is post cereal, like in the pic of my groceries. the milk is kinda weird here though, it doesn't taste or smell the same. 

it's sorta getting easier, but i feel like i'm too nice. i need to be harsher i think to get the kids to listen to me. sometimes they are such lil shits! hehe. and some of them are really cute . . . teacher jennifer! teacher jennifer! or jennifer teacher! they say to me, hehe. cracks me up. one kid gave me an orange too. 

i'm hoping this week goes by smoother than last week. and the kiddies behave better. cause jennifer teacher is going to get pissed if they don't. 

i watched lots of that 70s show while i was recovering sunday. i've watched a ton of it while i've been here. i wish i had the rest of the seasons, or internet so i could find the rest. 

did i ever tell you they have love motels here? cindy was telling me about them when we went out for pancakes cause there was a bunch in the area we were in. i guess korean kids live at home til they're married, so they use those to hook up, or anyone else who wants a room, heh. apparently they provide condoms free, are really clean (surprisingly), and there are rates for just a couple hours or overnite. there's also a hidden garage so you can't see the cars going in, and you don't have to drop your keys off to a person, there's a dropbox or something. hah. cracks me up. 

this morning hayley and i tried to go get our medical checks done. we went into seoul, about a 45 min trip, to find out they don't do the medical checks on saturdays! bah. so we headed to emart for groceries then home. we headed out again around 7 to meet up with todd and daniel. we went to a bar called dublin's. it was supposed to be an irish pub . . . and it was so american. all american music and definitely had the atmosphere of one. the bartenders/waiters were crappy though. they took forever to come back and it took like an hour to get some fries we ordered. i had a sex on the beach, midori sour, some of a gross long island iced tea and then we headed back to hayley's apartment to have some soju mixed with orange juice. quite tasty. it was really funny, i found out that daniel likes demetri martin too like me. i went thru a ton of music at hayley's place, i had my laptop. i was the DJ! hehe, they seemed to enjoy a lot of it. todd was the worst of all of us. he was sorta napping on the floor and when he went back to his apartment he forgot his shoes, hehe. 

i encountered my first "squatter" last nite too at dublin's. here there are western toilets, and there are squatters, which are basically a hole in the floor. they flush like a toilet though. so weird and so awkward.  and no toilet paper! i've encountered a lot of bathrooms without any toilet paper or paper towels too. so weird. annoys me.

cindy took me to a pancake place for dinner. they had dr. pepper! and we went to a bar called happy liquor. i only stayed a lil bit cause everyone there was already wasted and i didn't want to drink much. they all seemed nice though. cindy only knew like 4 of the people there, so we were almost  on the same level. i had a bit of soju cocktail, and even that i felt it the next morning, heh.

so i just finished my second day of teaching. it's pretty much been insanity. 

today wasn't as bad, but yesterday was crazy. the teaching part wasn't that bad, but at the last min we were given all these handouts about the school, curriculum, tests, etc that we had to give the kids and explain, and we had to hand out the books, which took forever. so that didn't leave much time for lesson, so i had to sorta gloss over things a lot, and it was way stressful. the kids were pretty good for the most part, they just asked a lot of questions. i have 6 classes on MWF and then 4 TTh.

today started out really rough though. my first class was a class of the lowest level of kids, and there were 2 boys in the class that kept talking over me and not listening to anything i was saying. i had no idea what to do! they kept speaking korean, and they're only supposed to speak english here, so i kept trying to tell them but they kept saying no! no! no english! i managed to separate them, finally even though the one kid latched onto his chair. but they were still acting out and throwing stuff at each other. bah. i wanted to kick them out, but they haven't really told us what to do in terms of discipline. i talked to some other teachers about it, and they said that there's a plan in the works on what to do about discipline. i guess i need to figure something out in the meantime. the rest of my classes went pretty good, they seemed to really like the games i had them play. i like when they actually get involved and then it's fun. whoo.

anyways, i finished at 5:45 today cause i have the last 3 periods off. i think all the teachers do at some point today. whoo. so i'm taking a break right now, and then i have to start planning for my classes tomorrow. hopefully i can get most of it done now so i don't have to do much when i go home, and then i can just go to bed. i'm so exhausted even though i only had 4 classes today. i still have to figure out some time that i can go for my medical thing so i can get my alien card. i may end up not going til sat morning though cause i'm not sure how long it will take and i need to be back for classes by 1:30. 

anyways, i should probably get to planning. i'm getting faster at it than i was to begin with. now i just need to get better at controlling the kids and pace - sometimes i go thru things too fast and end up with extra time and nothing to do so i have to sorta make something up off the top of my head. 

i suck at discipline. they just laugh in my face and act up more. bah.

I had my alarm clock in my luggage, and I plugged it in here . . . and it worked for like 5 min then died. when i picked it up i could hear something shaking around in it, so it must've broken. i managed to find one here, a lil kiddie one and the numbers (it's digital) are all in different colors. 

i'm pretty happy with my new couch, i bought a blanket to put over it cause it was kinda dirty, but it's pretty comfy.