Apparently it is against policy for me to teach alone. I’m supposed to be teaching with the homeroom teacher (lol) and at the very least, the homeroom, teacher should be there most of the time. I chatted with Helen for an hour about the students and other things. She told me these fifth graders are notorious, and had problems with authority dating all the way back to the third grade. Big yikes. Apparently all the trouble kids were in one class and that year, the homeroom teacher changed four times. Eventually the vice principal and the head teacher had to monitor class every day until the following school year when…

At the hospital, I am the nightmare version of myself. Quite literally: in my most frustrating dreams, I am easily hurt and driven to tears. The people around me see me cry and instead of feeling sympathy, feel disgust. That wasn’t far from my experience last week. After a worrisome episode of arrythymia, I decided to put my national insurance to use and get checked out. Better safe than sorry! I wandered the dark empty hospital looking for the emergency room for twenty minutes before a call to Yana clarified I was in the wrong building. Say it with me: thank goodness for Yana. She’s the only one of my…

Fifth grade made me mad. The problem is, in those moments I have to react on my feet. I cannot go on the defensive and I need to think carefully, but also incredibly quickly, to diagnose how to handle the situation without making anyone cry. Myself included. Three girls of 5-6 sat in their seats while their classmates flitted around practicing. It took four separate reminders to get them to actually get up and talk to each other, and another several minutes before they admitted to me that not one of them had kept their scripts from last week. They needed further prompting to rewrite it. There were also two…

The chatty sub has returned and is already back to gifting me with various food items. Today was a simple day of sixth grade classes; I quickly learned that allowing them to form their own groups for Jeopardy was a no-go but things smoothed out after that. 6-6 has rearranged their seating which has separated the more talkative boys and made the day easier as a whole. I talked to a few teachers on a message board to brainstorm best activities for my travel school kids (they dislike competition so collaborative activities were helpfully suggested). My Anki deck also got revamped with vocabulary from my last few tutoring sessions. I…

“Excuse me, what flavor is this?” I asked the woman working behind the counter at my neighborhood 7-11. She is one of the three main workers I see among a young guy with bleached hair, an older woman with no patience for delivery men, and a new young male addition who laughed softly the other day when I dropped my purchases all over the floor and cheerfully exclaimed “aigoo!” I’ve met this woman before because I remember her cheerily asking me where I work and what I do. She came out from behind the counter and looked at the pink Oreos with me. I told her in Korean, “The box…

This morning our debate class was monitored by someone from the office of education. I was expecting a strict government official but a well dressed older woman joined us and refreshingly, made small talk during breaks. She seemed surprised to hear that I teach at an elementary school, though I really felt my roots when I had the high schoolers repeat after me on a few words I had tagged for a pronunciation check. She grew up in Busan and agreed that driving there is not as terrible as people say. “Busan and Jinhae are very old cities so the roads are narrow and there is traffic. Changwon has wide…

This morning Jack said he had a potted hydrangea for me. I didn’t ask for a plant and I didn’t tell him that I am quite horrible at keeping plants alive so at the end of the day he insisted on driving me home with my new terra-cotta friend. I sat in the backseat of his extremely long van because the 4-1 homeroom teacher is apparently Jack’s carpool buddy. I half listened to them chitchat while I tried not to doze off in the backseat. With traffic it took nearly as long to drive five blocks as it takes me to walk home in the afternoons. There was a shift…

On Sunday after class I went shopping for big people work clothes and ended up with only crop tops so mission fail. As I checked out at H&M, the young but extremely tall college boy asked in excellent (and unexpected) English if I needed a bag. I was so taken aback that I immediately said no though I should have taken one to prevent my new purchase from getting crumpled and dirtied at the bottom of my backpack. He was handing me the receipt when I realized I should just tell him. “Your English is really good, by the way.” I like complimenting strangers and it’s really the only acceptable…