With EPIK placements for the Spring 2018 intake coming up I know that many of your are in the horrible in-between waiting period. With nothing much to do other than think about packing and study Korean, I know that I spent a lot of time just desperately trying to envision what my life was going…
The weight of being a "foreigner" in Korea comes and goes. Some days it's heavier than others. Some days the term 외국인 feels like jab. Like when a co-worker who I'm close to calls me 원어민 쌤 instead of my name. Some days it can start to feel like all I am is my "foreign-ness."…
I made a post a few weeks ago about a lesson that I did that went surprisingly well. It was called The Oscars lesson. The activity is essentially just "write a dialog" but disguised as "we're all going to the Oscars next week and you have to present a script." And it worked shockingly well.…
A Day in the Life of an English Middle School Teacher in South Korea Compared to recent posts from my trip to Tokyo, this is probably going to be incredibly boring. But this is reality, much more so than jetting off to Japan for the weekend. And while it's certainly not as exciting…
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…
For anyone thinking of coming to Korea to teach, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by sheer number of options that exist. There are hagwons where you can teach adults at night, or kindergarten during the day, or businessmen early in the morning. There are public schools where your classes will probably have at…
Continue reading ➞ The Virtues of EPIK: English Program in Korea
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
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,…
Breaking into a new culture in the workplace is not an easy task. Every job, and office, and company, or any group for that matter always operates under different social expectations even in our home countries. If I started a new teaching job in America it would be much of the same, but easier…
My second day of teaching went a lot like the first. Except I didn't have to worry about figuring out how to walk to school, how to get to the office, where my desk was, or who my co-teachers were. So I could actually focus on noticing things about the school and the students.…
Hours and Miles 