ESL Adventures

Teaching in South Korea

Archive for June, 2007

Kim Chi Chun

I know how to cook exactly one Korean dish. And as I had it for dinner tonight, I decided to take some pictures along the way and teach the rest of you how to make Kim Chi Chun.

Kim Chi Chun is like a savory pancake. It’s extremely easy to make. Heck, even I can do it. Sorry about the fuzzy measurements below. I do this by eye as I have no measuring cups or spoons. And it’s not like baking where all the amounts need to be precise. As long as your batter is about the same consistency as pancake batter, you’ll be fine.

 

Start by assembling your ingredients. You’ll need flour (just plain old white flour will do), water, Kim chi, oil and salt (optional).

Then get all of your tools together. You’ll need a frying pan, a spatula, a cutting board, scissors, a spoon and a bowl.

Dump some flour into the bowl (I think I used about a cup) and pour some water over it (a 1/3 of a cup maybe) and mix. The consistency should be the same as pancake batter.

Open the bag of kim chi and pour the liquid into the bowl. Then take your scissors and shred the kim chi.

Dump the Kim chi into the batter and mix well.

Now put a couple of tablespoons of oil in your skillet and heat it up. Once it’s hot, pour some of the batter into the skillet. They should be the size of small pancakes.

When they have cooked a minute or so, flip them. This is the same as if you were making breakfast pancakes.

Cook until no more batter oozes out when you press on them with a spatula. Put them on a plate and sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt. This, of course, is optional if you’re watching your sodium intake.

Serve with soy sauce for dipping. Again, this is optional if you don’t like soy sauce or you’re watching your sodium intake.

 

Personally, I prefer them without the soy sauce, but I was having some serious salt cravings this evening, so I decided to go for the dipping.

 

And there you have it. Your first Korean dish in nine easy steps. Enjoy!

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Home Life,Korea,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

My weekend

Thank goodness it was a rainy weekend. I don’t feel so bad for sitting in front of the computer all day for two days.

I have been planning on triple booting (Vista Home Premium/XP Professional/Ubuntu Feisty Fawn) my laptop for quite a while. I started the process about 6 weeks ago. I managed to get the hard drive partitioned before I left for Korea. That process only took about 2 hours or so. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but it was probably something stupid. By the time I reinstalled Vista, I was so frustrated that I knew Ubuntu was going to have to wait for another day. And XP is going to have to wait just a bit longer as well. I’m waiting on my brother to slipstream me a new install CD as the one I had doesn’t have the drivers for my SATA controller.

So yesterday was the day to install Ubuntu. I pulled out the tutorial I found online and popped in the installer CD I burned. The install was truly one of the quickest and least painful ones I’ve ever done. The only problem I had to solve was a silly one. All I needed to do was right click the ext3 partition to specify it as the mount point (errr… at least I think that’s what it was called).

One reboot at the end of the install and I was up and running. First thing I did was install all of the updates and then started trying to break it. My first project was to get BOINC installed. I was following a forum thread that another cruncher wrote and managed to screw it up at least twice. I did learn that Google and “man” are indeed your friends. But in the end I did get it up and running.

I got Firefox and OpenOffice up and running and set-up just the way I like them. I installed Flash and Java so I can see all the nifty things on the web. I half figured out the problem I was having with RhythmBox. What I did should have solved the entire problem, but hasn’t. So I’ve Googled and also posted on a message board for help from a Linux guru as my Google skills seem to be failing me.

So all in all, I think I did fairly well for a weekend’s worth of work. I have a shiny new OS to play with. I learned some new things. And I got myself out of jams all by myself (even if the terminal still scares me).

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Home Life,Linux Adventures,Off time and have No Comments

My current schedule

I teach from 9:40 AM to 6:00 PM with various breaks during the day.

A list of my classes…

Morning:

  • June
  • April
  • March
  • November
  • July
  • Sha Jha
  • February

Afternoon:

  • B1
  • B4
  • C3
  • C5
  • D2
  • Ivy

And as for the naming scheme. The pre-school classes (morning classes) are named after the months of the year. January is the lowest level of the youngest age group. November is the highest level of the oldest age group. I’m not quite sure where the break points are.

Sha Jha is the name of the classes that meet in the Kindergarten. They’re separate from rest of the school. The come all day and only study English a few periods a day. This is the class I have with 22 three-year olds.

The elementary school classes (afternoon classes) are given a letter and a number. The letter indicates the age group, with A being the youngest and D being the oldest. The number indicates the level, with 1 being the lowest and 6 being the highest. Ivy is made up of kids from all age groups and is the “elite” class. They are considered to be the top students at the school.

 

So, here’s my current schedule, courtesy of Open Office.

My schedule

posted by Kathryn in Teaching and have No Comments

Around the world

I have a few class where I teach for a double period, meaning 50 minutes instead of 25. I had that today with my B1 math class. They’re “learning” subtraction right now. I put learning in quotes because the math book they’re using is ridiculously easy for them. They’re way past simple subtraction facts in their public schools. But the point of the school I teach at is to present many of the major subjects in English to reinforce what they’re learning in their English lessons.

Studying simple subtraction facts for 50 minutes when you already know them really must be a painful thing. So I decided to lessen the pain. I told them we had to work in our books for the first 25 minutes, but then after that we would play a game.

It was funny to watch their little faces light up. “Game?” “Teacher, Game?” But I also played mean teacher and wouldn’t tell them what the game was until it was time to play. I never saw 12 kids work more frantically to get their work done.

We played “Around the world”. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the game, I will describe it.

Have your students sit in a circle. You pick one person to start. Eeny- Meeny-Miny-Moe always makes the Korean kids laugh. That person stands behind the person next to them. The teacher then holds up a flashcard with a math fact on it. The two students race to see who can give the answer first. If the student standing gets it first, he or she moves to stand behind the next student. If the student sitting gets it first, he or she stands up and the other student sits down. The new standing student moves to stand behind the next student. And you just keep going around the circle.

I gave a sticker (they collect them to trade in for a gift certificate when they reach a set amount) to any student who could go all the way around the circle. If that does happen, once that student gets back to their starting point, have him or her trade places with the person who is sitting.

A fun thing to do once the kids get the hang of the game is to pick a student to be the “teacher”. I changed “teachers” after each trip around the circle. Warning, there will be extreme amounts of begging to be the “teacher” once you start this.

I’m going to try this with other prompts, things like phonics words, target vocabulary and clocks. I have a number of classes that would probably enjoy the game.

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Games,Students,Teaching and have No Comments

Thursday’s Dinner

Yeah yeah yeah. So I’m a bit late in getting this up. My brain was one step above mush (does that make it oatmeal?) until today. But such is life.

Thursday (June 14th) was Rozina’s birthday so we all went out to dinner. I’d tell you the names of what we had, but the sheet of paper Ells wrote it down on for me mysteriously disappeared off my desk Friday afternoon. I’m not exactly sure where it went. But it’s a minor detail.

It was the cutest little restaurant. Very earthy with rustic wooden tables and benches. I was excited there were actually benches. I expected to sit on the floor. It smelled like there was an open fireplace in there. That woody, smoky smell.

We all sat down and ordered some Hite Beer. I’m not a huge beer drinker and Hit is pretty yucky, so I only had a little bit. With the beer, the waitress brought some popcorn. It was okay.

We ordered dinner. We had a spicy fish soup and a spicy chicken stew. It was so delicious. I’ve missed spicy food so much. Along with the main dishes we had rice, yellow radishes (they’re not like the red radishes in the US at all) pickled kimchi style and of course, kimchi.

All I can say is it was excellent. I’ll definitely be visiting there again. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Off time,Staff and have No Comments

Mogies

Your Korean Word of the Day is…

Mogie

In English…

Mosquito

I’m getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes here. I have a dozen bites on my right arm, six on my left, three on my forehead and god only knows how many on my legs. I have no idea how they’re getting in my apartment as I sleep with the windows shut and the air conditioner on low.  Although I have the windows open during the day, they do have screens.  And I didn’t have nearly as many bites when I went to bed as when I woke up this morning.

Thankfully I have some hydrocortisone cream courtesy of my mother’s friend, Mrs. Peters. So I’ve been putting that on the bites.  And I’m trying my best not to scratch, but it seems Korean mosquito bites itch even more than American mosquito bites.

Some of my students were talking about how bites they have.  Most have one or two. They then remarked how many I have. I just told them that I’m extremely sweet.  And that’s why the mosquitoes like to bite me.

posted by Kathryn in Home Life,Korea,Korean Vocabulary and have No Comments

Gotta love it

I’m sitting here in front of the computer at work.  I arrived in Ulsan in one piece.  I wish my luggage was with me.  I went and bought laundry soap so I could wash my clothes.  First day in dirty clothes…  yeah.  That would be a bad idea.

I’m stiff and sore from traveling, but my body clock is almost adjusted.  There are advantages to arriving in the morning. 

I promise to write a proper entry just as soon as I get internet access in my apartment.

posted by Kathryn in Moving and have No Comments