Friday

My camera's battery died before I realized it was too late so no pictures today. Sorry.
Well today was my first real day as a teacher. I had five classes the first four were all grade school age and the last was middle school age. It was an orientation day, so all we had to do was go over rules and the book. Yeah, that took about fifteen minutes. We had to make up the rest of the time on our own. Joy.
I did a 'get to know you' sheet for them to fill out and present, and this way I have something with their names on it. This still left me with 20 or 30 minutes to go. All I can say is thank goodness for EFY, I took some of the games we played there and changed them so that they were ESL learning tools. I had a ball of yarn and they threw it to each other but they had to say each others names and then after a while say phrases and sentences, (this made a web which translated to a cool object lesson which I think none of them understood). The game worked great for the first class and after the bell rang I had a massive mess of yarn to sort out. Yeah totally didn't see that coming.
The other classes went about the same as the first. One of my classes got canceled because there weren't enough students in it. Which was fine by me, I now have a good balance of 4-5 classes a day throughout the week.
My last class was the middle school group. One of the more seasoned teachers, his name is David, warned me that normally this age group is hard to get motivated and their english isn't as good as the others. So I asked around for ideas for another game that might interest them a bit more. The director suggested pictionary, I spiced it up a little and had them split into two groups and made a competition out of it. It worked great, the four boys really got into it and everyone had fun. The director came up to me afterward and said good job (I think), she kept going on as though she wanted the credit for making up the game, which is fine if she really needs to feel that way. I'm starting to feel she really lacks some basic 'boss' skills, but I'll get into that later.
The first day was a success, but very tiring and I didn't really eat anything the whole day cause I was nervous. So one of the Korean teachers invited us to out to dinner with her. And oh what a dinner.
We went to a seafood place and they first served you a big bucket of mollusks. Soaked in a spicy white broth with spring onions floating around. Then they opened up this hole in the middle of the table where they lit a burner and stuck a case full of clams, mollusks, abalones, and one very live octopus. The thing was trying to escape but then they put the lid on it and everything started to cook by steam. We kept eating the mollusks while we waited for the unfortunate sea creatures to cook. After about fifteen minutes, the server came out and opened the lid, and started to cut up the gigantic clams and the octopus. Everything was surprisingly tasty. I really enjoyed the octopus, it had a really interesting crunchy and slimy quality to it.
After we ate for a while and were almost finished most of the creatures, there was a lot of broth still at the bottom of the case. The server then came out and dumped a ton of noodles in so it made a tasty soup. It was kinda spicy though so I didn't eat as much as the others did. I am slowly getting used to the stuff. It was an amazing meal, though.
Afterward, everyone wanted to go out drinking, because apparently that is what you do here. Well, that might be a problem with me, so I told them it was time for bed anyways so I left them to their night and went home. Which was good because it was like one o'clock when I got home.
Definitely an interesting day.