ESL Adventures

Teaching in South Korea

Archive for the 'Off time' Category

Happy Children’s Day!

I’d like to wish all my current and former students a very Happy Children’s Day!  I hope you had a great day off from school.

Anne and Anna

Anne and Anna

posted by Kathryn in Celebrations,Holidays,Little Campus,Off time,Pictures,Students and have No Comments

Sue’s Wedding

Sue got married yesterday.  Unlike the previous weddings I attended, this one was in a church.  It was a beautiful service.  Sue’s husband sang a love song to her during the wedding.  I wish her and her husband the best of luck for the future.  They’ll be honeymooning in Saipan.

posted by Kathryn in Celebrations,Korea,Little Campus,Off time,Pictures,Staff and have No Comments

I’ve been trained

I went to bed last night.  It dawned on me as I was  lying in bed.   Ivory has me trained.  I was all the way by the wall, basically smushed into the corner.  She was all stretched out on the other part of the bed.

It’s true what they say.  Dogs have owners; cats have servants.

posted by Kathryn in Home Life,Ivory,Just Wow,Off time and have No Comments

Happy White Day

It’s White Day today.  The streets of Samsondong were crazy packed with couples being lovey dovey.  Oh wait, let me digress a bit.

What is White Day?  Another wonderful Korean Hallmark holiday of course.  White Day falls on March 14th, a month after Valentines Day.  The tradition on Valentines Day is for the women to give candy and gifts to the men.  It’s just the opposite on White Day.

So back to Samsondong.  I had to go to Kidari today to pick up a workbook for my D1 class .  Kidari is right across the street from Lotte Hotel.  There are quite a few little restaurants in that area, including the one I went to lunch at.  The cab driver almost hit about 12 cars on the drive down to Samsondong.  Ugh.  I hate cabs in Korea.  This one section of Samsondong has a bunch of very narrow streets that aren’t really fit for automobile traffic.  So many people.  Not just people.  Couples in Love.  Disgusting.  I was glad to get done what I needed to get done so I could get the heck out of that madness.  On the plus side, lunch was good.  Spicy chicken and rice.  I’ll have to find out what it was called because I just can’t remember.

I got a nice little haul of candy from students yesterday.  I’ll probably end up giving most of it away to kids who come in and chat with me.  I like to reinforce the whole speaking English thing.  Korean Hallmark holidays are good for building up stashes of candy and treats for that.

posted by Kathryn in Celebrations,Holidays,Korea,Off time,Web sites and have Comment (1)

Whoa – Actual Updates

Well, in addition, to being totally busy, I’m also sick.  I actually took a sick day today.  Seriously, I never do that.  The last time I took sick time was when the doctor dumped me in the hospital with pneunomia.  That’s not something I want to repeat.  I picked up a cold, probably from a student, but possibly a coworker.  It so wonderfully turned into a sinus infection last week.  That immediately traveled to my chest and I now have bronchitis.  Oh yeah.  The biggest reason I took off today was because I have no voice.  Like, can’t even whisper no voice.  My ears are also blocked up so I can’t hear much of anything.

So to kind of bring things up to date, we started our new term.  We have a whole batch of new kids and the classes of the returning students have been rearranged.  Again, I get the pleasure (ha!) of teaching the second floor Sha Sha program.  It’s not so bad anymore.  I’ve explained that the books they use for those kids are horrible.  So I read story books and sing songs.  The goal of the program isn’t to get the kids fluent in English.  It’s really just general exposure in letters, sounds, colors and basic vocabulary.  I have a 6 year old class and I have the 5 year old class.  I met the 5 year olds yesterday.  There’s about 15 of them.  One one of them flipped out when he saw me.  Poor little thing, he didn’t want any part of me.  I have a feeling my 3.5 year old self probably wouldn’t have wanted much of anything to do with the adult me either.  I don’t hold it against him.  He’s a little cutie actually.

I have a total of 4 kindergarten classes, plus the Sha Sha classes.  I have 6 classes in the afternoon (2 A classes, 2 B classes, 2 D classes) plus two speaking and writing classes (A1 and D3).

We finally are almost finished with a curriculum.  This involved quite a few hours of meetings, but I think it will benefit everyone.

Ivory is doing well.  When I took her to the vet last week, she had her first set of kitten shots.  She’s still pure white except for a dime sized patch on the top of her head that’s gray (salt-and-pepper really).  She was 1200 grams (2.65 pounds) at her vet visit and she’s about 3 months old.  She’s now eating Hill’s Science Diet for kittens.  She loves it.  She devours it.  In fact, she’s doing that right now.  She loves the little toys on the end of an elastic band.  She goes crazy.  She leaps and twirls.  Ivory still takes up the entire bed.  I’m not sure how a tiny kitten can do that.  But it seems where ever I want to sleep, she’s there.  She’s actually outgrowing the kitten looking stage.  She seems to be growing into her body.  It’s amazing the changes in a few short weeks.  I can’t even imagine life without her.  I still miss Sparkler and Jeepers (my last cat).  Nothing will ever replace them, but Ivory has her own place in my heart.

I’ll post my schedule and I’ll try to get the curriculum posted within the week.

Take care everyone!

posted by Kathryn in Home Life,Ivory,Little Campus,Off time,Teaching and have No Comments

Kitten!

I have an adorable ball of fuzz. I’m so excited. It’s only in the last couple weeks I’ve felt like I’ve completed the grieving process with Sparkler. I loved her so much. But, I knew I didn’t want another guinea pig. I knew I wanted a cat. Now, you have to understand, Korea is not a cat country. No serious. It’s really not. I went to a dozen places before I found one with a cat for sale. And dear lord was she expensive. But she was totally worth every won I spent. She’s been in my life less than 12 hours and I can’t imagine living without her.

Right now, she’s curled up in (on?) one of my shoes. Once I coaxed her out from under the bed, she started to play. She has one of those mice on an elastic string tied to a stick. She loves it. She was going crazy. She’s purrs like no cat I’ve ever heard before.

I’m still working on the name thing. I know her Korean name will either be 눈(noon) which means snow (and eye) or 구름(goorum) which means cloud. I’m sort of leaning toward 눈. I’m just not sure what English name to give her. I’ll take suggestions.

So here are some pics of my new baby.

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Home Life,Just Wow,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

My New Home

So I’ve made the jump over to my self-hosted WordPress installation.  It was somewhat easier than I was expecting.  Getting the front page of the site up was not an easy thing.  Oh the getting it on the server part was easy, it was the creating it part that was difficult.  I don’t remember much HTML and I can’t wrap my head around CSS.  Thus, I used a table based layout template I found somewhere on the web.  I know it’s so 1997, but at the moment, I have other things that I want to learn.

Keep checking back.  I’m working on getting all my content moved.

posted by Kathryn in Moving,Off time and have No Comments