First Week of the Spring Semester: Monday and Tuesday

My first two full days at Avalon have been pretty crazy, but fairly good overall.  The academy is in the process of moving from the second floor to the sixth floor, which started last Friday, continued over the weekend and is still in progress.  There's still a lot of clutter about, there's nowhere to plug in devices like computers, and we only got wifi and networked printers working today.  A lot of kids don't have books (which may be an unrelated problem), and the TAs have been scrambling to get us copies in a timely manner on top of everything else they do.  Another hiccup involved me being told to use one book (blue) when all the students had the red book.  (The classes switch between red and blue and this semester is red, except for one class that has red, blue and green books, but maybe not anymore.  It's all very confusing.)  Thankfully, the books are straightforward enough that I was able to teach the class fairly smoothly without looking at it.

Monday I have two good, energetic elementary school classes (which is a huge relief, since I have them three times a week) and two middle school classes that are slightly more difficult but still fairly talkative.  Tuesday is looking to be considerably more difficult, with two more elementary and middle school classes are are all really quiet.  The middle school classes are also enormous, with 18 and 15 students respectively.  Considering that both are speaking classes, I barely know what to do with them.  I'm grateful that the kids have been well-behaved and do their work with very little prompting; the worst problems have been kids chatting with their classmates in Korean and one case of eating in class.  Still, I need to find some way to make the material more interesting for them, or every class with them is going to be painfully boring.

The constant running between buildings is already beginning to wear on me, though.  There are swarms of kids leaving after almost every period, forcing me to choose between hurrying down the stairs or waiting for an overcrowded elevator.  (I usually pick the stairs.)  It takes me about 6-7 minutes to take a few notes on the class, erase the board, pack up my stuff (we take our markers and eraser with us) and rush over to the other building.  Since the break between classes is only five minutes long, I'm almost always late for my next class, and good luck trying to use the bathroom or get a drink of water under these conditions.  A snack gets dropped off in the faculty rooms around 7 pm, but I don't ever see it until classes are done for the day at 10 pm.  Even though Wednesday is my busiest day with a full five classes, I'm actually looking forward to it because I have four elementary school classes in a row, which means no building switching until the last class.

The vast majority of my classes I only see once a week, with one class twice a week and two classes three times a week.  It comes out to 15 different classes total, ranging from 2-18 students each, and every month I'm expected to write a short paragraph (3-4 sentences) about every student so that the Korean teachers can make phone calls to the parents.  I'm not looking forward to it, needless to say.

New Mailing Address

Here's my new school's address.  For the purposes of sending me mail, it's better than my apartment because the apartment building has unsecured mailboxes.

1031-2 Golden Bell Tower 6F
Jung-4 dong, Wonmi-gu, Bucheon-si, Gyeonggi-do
South Korea, 420-020

Medical Check-Up

Friday morning was 'feel like an idiot' day at the local hospital. I needed to get another medical check-up to renew my visa and Avalon recommended I do it as soon as possible and as early in the day as possible, so I skipped dinner last night in order to get up early and get it done.

I got to the hospital around 10 am, but couldn't find where I was supposed to go. A friendly doctor helped me find the right place, but I'd completely forgotten that I needed to bring my passport and some passport photos. It seemed to be okay, but I need to bring them when I come back next Friday to pick up the three copies of the report I need. It also cost me 135,240 won out of my own pocket; Avalon apparently isn't reimbursing me for it, which I'm not thrilled about.

I was then directed to go to the changing room and change my clothes, where the next round of embarrassment began. Not realizing that I only needed to take off my jackets and shirt and change into a hospital shirt/half-gown, I walked out without any pants on. A nurse directed me to put them back on, but then I forgot to put on any slippers, so I had to go back and get those, too. After that things went pretty smoothly, though I did have to sheepishly admit that I didn't speak enough Korean to understand their questions in every room. The staff spoke enough English to tell me which room to go to next, but not much more. They checked my blood pressure, height, weight and waist size, took urine and blood samples, took a chest X-ray, and checked my teeth. Thankfully, the whole thing only took about an hour, and that was including all my fumbling about.

Moving Day

Lot to talk about today, more because I wrote half of this yesterday on my phone and then Facebook auto-updated and erased it all >:(

Taught two more classes on Friday that went really went, and got my final schedule for next semester with 20 classes instead of 22.  Score!  Now I'll be teaching four classes on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, five on Wednesday and three on Friday.  I still have to be at the office from 2 - 10 pm even if I start late or finish early, but I'm sure I'll have plenty to do for quite a while.

Moved into my new apartment yesterday.  It's a loft, so the bed is upstairs.  There's also no key because the door has an electronic lock that runs on four AA batteries.  It seems pretty good, except that the departing teacher got locked outside for two hours yesterday because the batteries died, so that's something to watch out for.  I have quite a bit of storage space, but no drawers, so I'll probably need to buy something to put my socks and such away in.  There's also no table or chair, which I'll want to get to make using my computer more comfortable.  The windows are opaque, though I'm on the third floor and face the adjacent building anyway, so there wouldn't be much of a view.

I went out a few times yesterday to get stuff, most notably food so I could finally have a decent breakfast again.  (Hello, bananas, cereal and soy milk!  I've missed you!)  Avalon bought me a new blanket and pillow set, and I took the existing blankets to a nearby dry cleaner on the departing teacher's advice.  I think I spent close to 200,000 won on stuff yesterday, and I'm not done yet.

I also, frustratingly, ran into some fairly serious computer problems yesterday.  My computer started freezing on startup and occasionally crashing because of a machine check exception.  Once or twice it let me past the startup screen, only to freeze a few minutes later.  I finally figured out that it only freezes if starts up while connecting to the public/unsecured wifi I've been using.  If I turn on my computer and then connect, there's no problem.  (The departing teacher used his phone as a hotspot instead of getting internet service, so I have to make do until I can call someone, which won't be until Monday.)  It would appear that there's a hardware issue with my wifi adapter, which doesn't make me happy.  I've checked thoroughly for viruses and haven't found anything there.

Today I go back to Incheon to get my boxes so I can finish unpacking and get a little more settled in.  Monday I start teaching a full class load; it's going to be tough, but so far the classes don't seem too hard to teach.  I'm sure everything with be fine! *waits for disaster to strike*

First Classes at Avalon

I forgot to mention it last night, but I taught my first two classes yesterday. The first was a Glide Intermediate (GI, mid-high level elementary) Speaking class that I'd observed on Tuesday and gotten along with well, so it was a good first class. The second was a Mountain Intermediate (MI, mid level middle school) Speaking/Writing class, which was a bit more difficult. I hadn't met the students before, and I'd been warned that they might be very quiet, but I managed to get them to talk a fair amount without too much awkward silence. Another small challenge was that, as a speaking and writing class with two books, it was up to me to decide how much time to spend on each book.

I was, unsurprisingly, really nervous before both classes (a combination of performance anxiety and the difficulty of meeting new people), but the classes went better than I expected, and a lot better than my first classes at AEON and Baron's. I'll be teaching two more today before jumping into the full five classes on Monday, and hopefully they'll also be good!