Status Update 3/23/2013

Things are slowly getting easier.  The confrontation of discipline is still stressful for me, though I'm getting better at it and having to do less of it.  I have one class that I really gel with already, and they're great.  My youngest kids are best when I give them some sort of activity (they breezed through 12 pages of the workbook yesterday,) but they're a lot more restless when I start asking them questions about the book we're reading.  About half the class would rather chat with their neighbors or play with lint than talk to me, though, so it's my most discipline-heavy class.  My oldest kids also do their best to ignore me, and while I respect the fact that they're here against their will until 9 pm, they really frustrate me.  Baron keeps telling me not to try to herd cats and that it takes about two months for them to see me as their teacher, while Julie wants me to be tougher with them (she basically acts as the principal/yeller-in-chief.)  They also have their own ideas about how we should teach our classes, so there's a lot of mixed messages right now.

I spent the Saturday doing laundry and grading test papers - I had two classes write stories using at least 10 vocabulary words from the week, and it's slow going because it's often hard to interpret whether the students are using the words correctly or not.  One student wrote a page about how she didn't know what any of the words meant and how much she doesn't like tests (I had to give her a zero,) and another gave up on writing a cohesive story and just started tossing out all 20 words (he got a 5/10 because I was generous.)  I also stopped by a nearby street/farmers market and picked up a few things, including a big bag of grapes for ~$10.  It's looking like I'll be grabbing dinner with one or two of the other teachers tonight as well.

Food, cooking and scheduling are also being challenging.  I'm trying to adjust to a schedule of going to bed around 1 am (if I can finish eating a quick something by 10 pm) and waking up at 10 am, though that generally means I'm finishing breakfast at 11 am and thinking about lunch around 1 pm (so I can be at school and preparing for my classes by 2 pm.)  I don't have the obnoxious early Saturday schedule I had with AEON, but the timing of my work schedule is still at an awkward time and not having a dinner break is rough.  I get a snack with the kids at 4 pm and one at 5 pm, but I only have time to eat if I don't have to prepare anything for class.  If I need to get up early for anything, I have to skip dinner and go to bed hungry.  I've actually been going to bed earlier on the weekends than during the week :)  I make sure to clean the house and cook on Sunday, though my pots and bowls are smaller than in Japan, so I haven't made more than two servings at a time yet.  (Plus, it's hard to get online to check recipes.)

As for food, I can get about 14 bananas for $4-6 (the price varies for some unknown reason) from the closest market, though they go brown fairly quickly, so using them all up has been an interesting challenge.  I finally found soy milk, and while it has a different flavor than American soy milk, I'll be glad to stop relying on low-fat milk (fat-free milk basically doesn't exist here.)  Broccoli costs twice as much to get half as much, and I haven't found cauliflower yet.  Garlic always comes pre-peeled in bags of 25-30 cloves or more, which sounded great at first until I found out that it also goes moldy quickly that way (I'm experimenting with sealing it in a Ziploc bag to keep it fresh.)  I can't buy canned tomatoes, so I've been cutting up fresh ones (they come in big bags of 10,) but bottles of sauce are everywhere.  Sliced meat is almost nonexistent except for small, expensive packages of sliced ham (pork is easily the most common meat here,) and like Japan, there's no such thing as whole-grain bread.  I have an 8 kg bag of brown rice, but my rice cooker doesn't handle it very well (it wants to boil over, and it's a pain to clean,) so I've mostly been cooking rice porridge in a pot.  Cereal is pretty expensive ($5-7 a box, though I can buy big double-packs of Special K for about $13,) and Korean food labels almost never list sugar or fiber.  I've doing a lot of experimenting to figure out what is relatively healthy and what is loaded with sugar.

All in all, it's been a lot of adjusting, and there's still a lot more to do.  The kids make me grouchy on a regular basis, but I'm happy to say that things are more pleasant and less stressful after my third week here!