Another day done and full work week in the past.

I still don't have an alarm clock yet so waking up today, like the four days before it, were a bit of an adventure in controlling my tendency to sleep until midday. I shot up out of bed sometime around 8:30 and sprung to action. Starting with a single bowl of Frosted Flakes (I ran out of milk, so my second bowl was a no go) I got ready for my first Korean field trip. Apparently it's uncommon for the school to explain exactly where we go on these field trips so it was an adventure from the beginning. I was under the impression that we were headed to some kind of botanical garden/park. It turns out we were going to an art museum.

I went into the museum with an open mind, unsure what to expect from Korean art and I was pleasantly rewarded. The art was varied in style and there was a vast array of colors but the best part was watching the kids look on with bewildered stares. Knowing that an art museum is a completely different world for kids than adults Brandon Teacher (that's how teachers are shown respect) and I were mostly amused by the "oohs", "aahs" and "hmms" that we told the kids to use when they saw a picture that they liked. It was difficult to repress a smile when I thought about little Barney or Dino considering things like form, balance and symmetry as they meticulously scrutinized the artistic work in front of them. We had good weather for the day and in spite of the organized chaos that was the 200+ kids running around and talking about art broken English it was a particularly enjoyable morning and afternoon.

In an attempt to maintain the authenticity of time at a Korean art museum I accompanied a few of my colleagues to a leisurely meal at the local Outback when we returned from the trip. As if entering an American embassy, when we stepped through those double doors into a world of Australian stereotypes I basked in the boomerangs and Fosters beers that graced the walls and tabletops, respectively. As I ate I learned that the three classes I would be teaching that afternoon were, in fact, going to be taught by the head English teacher while I observed and taught for only part of the class. The news was a mixture of relief and disappointment. While I felt I that I was ready to teach, these were classes that had no experience with up until then and they were a different age group from the young kindergarten classes that I had helped teach before that. The result was rather reminiscent of the first day that I took over a part of one of those kindergarten classes. In my first class it was a bit of a bomb. I kinda lost myself midway and struggled from then on. I didn't teach at all for the second class because it was a shortened period and in the third class, while I could have done much better, I feel like a got a lot more positive feedback from the students and, all in all, it was a relative success.

Now it's about 8 o'clock and the first hours of my first Korean weekend are rapidly dissipating. One of the other teachers and I are heading downtown to a bar called Soul Train and we're gonna see where the night takes us. Hopefully there will be something to tell in my next post.

Good Night and Good Luck America!