We had some thunderstorms roll through the area a few hours ago. It went from pretty close to 100F to 70F.
The storms were pretty nasty with a lot of lightening and thunder and heavy rains. I shut down the computers and disconnected the DSL modem and router. I’m not much into frying them for no good reason.
I opened up the sliding door on my balcony and let the cool air in. It’s still raining off and on. I might just take a walk in the rain and grab some dinner from the Kimbob restaurant.
It was hot. There’s no other way to describe it. The kids were definitely drooping. They did have a good time playing in the fountain (as did I).
The day seemed a bit less structured, which was nice. The set-up was pretty much the same as Day 1. The kids rotated through the different stations. They all seemed to have a good time.
I’ve uploaded my photos to my Fotki site. I’ll post a very small sample of them here.
Cooling off in the fountain.
Juice break.
Time for ice-cream.
Pop the balloon.
It was part of a relay race.
The elementary school kids.
Today (Thursday) and tomorrow are our “Theme Days”. It’s just a fancy way of saying we take the kids to the park for the day and play games with them. All of the foreign teachers came up with games/activities for the kids to do. Rozina is playing Ultimate Frisbee. Mark is playing Rugby. Donna is playing Dodge Ball. Peter is playing Soccer Baseball (Kickball to you Americans). Janie is playing a modified version of Lawn Bowling. Jessica is playing Keys. And your’s truly is playing Quiz Show.
Wait you say. Everyone else is doing fun physical stuff and I’m basically teaching. Of course. The powers that be decided we needed one “quiet” activity. And I’m the lucky one. I was going to do Dodge Ball. But Donna has been here less than two weeks and I decided to just pass along my lesson plan to her to make her life easier.
So my “Quiz Show” consisted of me saying sentences and the kids having to tell me yes or no. I had them hold their arms in the shape of a circle for yes and in the shape of an x for no. I had some really goofy sentences like “The grass is purple.” and “Kathryn Teacher is a boy.” for the kids to respond to. I really liked my goofy sentences because the kids laughed a lot. With the more advanced kids I did things like “The word hat is a noun.” to quiz their knowledge of English grammar.
And when I say lucky, I really do mean lucky. It was almost 95 degrees and humid today (and more of the same tomorrow). While everyone else was running around in the sun, I was sitting in the shade. Even in the shade, it’s hot. We all came well prepared with sport drinks and sunscreen. I was out in the sun for a while playing in the fountain with some of the kids. And my face is red.
We do the same thing again tomorrow. By the end of the day (pre-schoolers in the morning and elementary kids in the afternoon) all the kids should have cycled through all of our stations. I have no idea what else might be going on tomorrow.
The one thing I could do without (besides the heat) was the one Korean teacher running around with the megaphone and blasting the siren to get the kids’ attention (think Ty Pennington, but worse). Granted, it worked the first four or five times. But she overdid it. She kept blasting it. I’m surprised the batteries lasted all day. At one point, she blasted it right in my ear. I came within second of snatching it out of her hands and throwing it into the fountain.
I did take a bunch of pictures today, but I’m too tired to upload them right now. Plus, getting them off my camera would involve rebooting into Windows and I can’t do that right now as I’m running some test results for a new BOINC project. So I’ll upload them to my picture site this weekend and post some of the better ones on my blog.
Or make that Birthday Tuesday. We’re doing it on Tuesday this month because the kids will be at the park on Friday for Theme Days.
I was with a different group of kids this month. There are so many students that birthdays are done in two groups depending on what side of the building their classroom is on.
I got to do the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” thing this month. If I remember right we had one “I don’t know”, a doctor, a scientist, a couple of teachers, a Mommy and a police officer.
Here’s a small selection of the pictures I took.
Our birthday boys and girls.
Lighting the candles.
Singing “Happy Birthday to You!”.
Blowing out the candles.
Yesterday I went to Lotte Mart to finally do some grocery shopping and buy some much needed things for my apartment (a wireless router being the primary one). With two large pillows and three bags of groceries and my bag full of work stuff and my purse, I wasn’t eager to walk the mile back to my apartment. So I caught a cab.
Now I have had extensive experience with the cab drivers in Yangsan, where I lived the last time. They generally drove like nuts, but I never feared for my life. Last night, I really thought I was going to die.
It seems like the little things we take for granted in the US don’t apply here. You know, the small things, like stopping for red lights and not driving the wrong way down one way streets.
The part of Ulsan I live in is dominated by one major road and tons of one way back streets. I live and work on one such street.
So this cab driver last night did a u-turn onto that very large, very busy road. Then he turned left on red. Then he started weaving through the back streets going way faster than I ever would (and I’m not known for driving particularly slow).
I’m sure this cab driver is a very nice man. But I think I’ll pass out if I ever see him again. I was shaking so badly, I could barely get out of the cab and into the apartment building.
I was struggling to get all of my stuff up three flights of steps. A nice gentleman who lived on the second floor saw me struggling up the steps and took pity on me. He carried all of my stuff from Lotte Mart up to my apartment for me and brought it into the kitchen (thank goodness it was clean, LOL). I must have said thank you about twenty times.
Twice a year, the students work on portfolios. They are graded and are included with their report cards. They sound impressive. Not really. They are usually just collections of worksheets that the students did in class. Morning classes (with the exception of the November Language portfolios) have around 10 pages. The afternoon classes have 20 pages.
I’ve spent the better part of the last month not teaching. I’ve been trying to gather enough work for the portfolios. I came pretty close to the page goals for all of my classes.
Thankfully, as the kids were doing their papers, I was keeping up with the grading. I only had about 50 papers to grade when I started this weekend. And those were from the last two days.
My goal was to have my portfolios handed in tomorrow (Monday). And I’m pleased to say, THEY’RE DONE!!!!!! Nah, I’m not excited or anything. I had finished all of the report card comments last weekend. Those are the hard things to do. I know my good kids and my bad kids really well. It’s the kids in the middle, that I’m still trying to learn about.
As of Friday afternoon, I had two out of eight classes finished. I brought the rest home. Basically, I had to finish grading, sort all of the papers, add up the points, put the grades on the report cards and staple everything together.
So now I don’t have to deal with this until December. But next time I’ll have longer than five weeks to compile all of the material for each student.
I’m all ready to get started.
Working on grading some papers.
Sorting all of the papers into a pile for each student.
The end result, the finished portfolios for six classes.
Report cards. They have been taking up a lot of time time lately. I have almost 120 students that I need to do portfolios and report cards for. It’s hard because I still don’t know all of my students that well. I seem to know the bad ones and the good ones. But the average ones… well… I’m still learning about them. That makes writing good comments a huge challenge.
I’ve done some fun things with my kids the last few weeks. I’ll write about those soon. I also went out to dinner last Friday with the other teachers and I’ll write about that soon as it was delicious.
I spent a good portion of the last two weekends becoming frustrated with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. It’s a program that allows you to take raw computer code and make it into a working program (among other things). I never did succeed in getting BOINC to build and have given up (temporarily?) out of sheer frustration. Not being happy with that, last night I switched over to my install of Ubuntu and tried getting a music player to build. I think that the compiling gods who decide who will succeed and who will not are picking on me. Because something is “wrong”. What exactly that means is somewhat beyond me. I just sent an email to the person who is guiding me through this adventure.
So look for updates in the near future.
ESL Photos
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