One would think that after having the same conversation with 700 students, about the same topic from the same script, I would have pretty much heard every answer there is to hear. And while yes, there is not much by the way of variety, still out of the blue some of them surprise me. There…
Continue reading ➞ Korean Middle School English Speaking Tests
It wasn't until about 5 minutes after class had already started, as I was standing in front of the classroom greeting everyone, that I finally decided what we were going to do that day. It was Friday afternoon, I was completely exhausted, and the idea of going into my afterschool class and trying to force…
Continue reading ➞ The Moment of Truth: After School English Class
Its name is Psychiatrist game. I genuinely don’t remember if I thought of this activity on my own, or if I read about it online somewhere. Either way I’m sure that it already exists and I’m even more certain that once enough time has passed I will be using it again with a different name…
April 12th marked two months in Korea for me. Teaching is unpredictable by its very nature and so even after 9 weeks of it, I still don’t feel like I know what to expect from any given day. What I have learned, however, are which classes to be excited about and which classes to…
Continue reading ➞ Korea Month Two: Spring, Co-Teaching, and a Weekend in Seoul
Newton's third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And it occurred to me tonight, as I sit here at 10:00pm utterly exhausted from a long Monday with an hour or two of lesson planning still ahead of me, that the same principle applies to teaching.…
So the protocol here is that all of the native English teachers have another Korean English teacher from the school in the room when we are doing our lessons. Their degree of involvement from any point after that completely depends on your situation. I feel incredibly lucky to have the co-teachers that I have,…
*Just for the record I absolutely do not intend to be writing about every single day here, but my first week hanging out in Seoul was really amazing so I figured it would be interesting for you guys! So here's a bunch of posts coming at you! Enjoy! Day 1: I woke up the first…
I made my official decision to move to Korea during Thanksgiving break of last year. This came at the end of a long internal battle between the side of me that felt like I'd be cheating on my first true love, South America, and the other side of me that increasingly knew that Korea was…
Continue reading ➞ How People Respond When I Say I’m Moving to Korea
6 months is a long time. I've been thinking a lot lately about when I became one of those "busy" people. I remember when I started university I had so much free time. I remember watching entire TV shows in a matter of weeks and hanging out in my friends dorms until the wee hours of…
One of the best thing you can do for yourself is to be friends with people who have vastly different stories than you. It makes your conversations more interesting, your connection more real, and opens your mind to worlds of possibilities that you have no means of reaching on your own. This realization came to me…
Continue reading ➞ On The Importance of Having Friends That are Very Different from You
