Yana told me every week the teachers meet with other teachers in their collective sphere to discuss best practices. Apparently the science teacher, who is also head teacher in charge of the school’s curriculum, wrote the book on teaching. Quite literally, he wrote a book. If my Korean were above a first grader’s I would read it. My travel school may be socioeconomically similar to my former Seoul school, but the staff of each are different. In Seoul it seemed like a lot of teachers were biding their time until they could rotate out to a better school after their five year contracts ended. Here the teachers are well aware…

I was waiting in the hallway in a little alcove when I caught the tail end of a fight. Two tall fifth grade boys were outside the bathroom, each clutching at their chest or stomach in pain; both appeared to be crying angrily. A sweet boy in a vest was between them. He pushed them apart then led them to class: the bowl cut boy in front of him, being pushed like a lawnmower, and the permed hair boy holding on to his vest like a spurned lover and being dragged along. When I came out of the alcove, the two fighting boys were in the midst of a talk…

I don’t know if the mystical bearded taxi man from last time communicated with his taxi brothers but I had another adventure at the Korean DMV. After I got another updated form from my local office about all of my past entries to and exits from Korea since my birth to present, I scheduled a taxi with the Kakao Taxi App which isn’t much different from Uber. The DMV is thirty minutes away by car or an hour by bus… a bus that comes every 90 minutes. It’s also located on a country road at the edge of town but I guess since many Koreans don’t drive, it wouldn’t be…

The tides are turning, and skinship is finally making a reappearance after a long drought in contact-free corona times. As you probably know by now, Korean society is generally much more touchy among people familiar with each other. In between fifth grade classes, one homeroom teacher in the lounge exclaimed something at me in delight, and not knowing what she was talking about, I looked to the other teacher in confusion who simply watched as I was bodily guided to class. “It’s time for English class, let’s go together!” My captor said. I love spending time with my students and don’t have Sunday blues because I look forward to seeing…

Have you ever tried to teach a reading portion of a chapter to a group of students who don’t know how to read? That was my Wednesday. I broke down the reading into smaller chunks knowing many students at my travel school struggle: I introduced the topic with a real video to stimulate background knowledge; students circled new vocabulary in the text and then wrote definitions by each circled word; students did think pair share with questions about the topic for prereading; students listened to the text, listened and repeated the text, then read aloud as a group; students answered the post reading questions. I did my best but it…

Today was chaos. 5-6 was frustrating and my notes from the last month show that they have always been frustrating, namely because of three loud boys who don’t stay on task. I don’t mind loud boys, but I cannot tolerate rude boys. I might just send them out of class next time, since their peers and my class time suffer because of their poor behavior. 5-5 was, to my absolute shock, on time today! The homeroom teacher stayed until 10AM to ensure all the students were seated with books out before he took off presumably for the teacher’s lounge. I commended their preparedness and felt my heart shed the gloom…

This morning I called my mom en route to school and she told me that the neighborhood bear had quite literally invited itself in through the back porch door to eat MnMs on the kitchen counter. My parents have a security camera on the front porch and I showed the fourth graders an older clip of that same bear moseying through our front yard. I continued the story in Korean: “My mom and I talked. Yesterday, that same bear came inside the house.” There was a collective gasp and even I got goosebumps. “Do you know the candy ‘MnMs’? It came to eat the MnMs. Our dog was very angry…

Due to some unknown traffic fate, not a single one of my seven possible morning buses arrived for twenty minutes. I sat there as the bus stop slowly became more crowded and agitated. By the time I finally got on, my ETA would be exactly when class was starting. I accepted the fate and texted Yana with the PPT files. But the bus situation was a bit like waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Yana did her introduction and review with the class and then asked if I had prepared for the book dialogue. Huh? What dialogue? There is a dialogue section but I hadn’t used it…