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.