There's no place like..home?

By the time the Gwangju orientation was over I was just ready to get on with life and finally know where I would be living and teaching. I had so many questions that couldn't be answered till I talked with my school. Also, I was kind of sick of living out of a suitcase. I was excited to finally settle down somewhere that I could call home for more than just a week or two. 
My mentor teacher and vice principal came and picked me up and took me to my school to meet the principal and get some paperwork done. 
This is what my school looks like. The grass here in Korea gets so brown! It is finally starting to turn green now though. 

I found this one online

My principal seemed very intimidating when I first met him but actually since then I have become a lot more comfortable with him. He actually asked me to go to the gym everyday after lunch and hit a volleyball back and forth with him. Weird right? I guess its a Korean thing. 

After we stopped by the school they took me to Mokpo and we went to the immigration office to fill out a form so that I could get my ARC (alien registration card, sort of like a green card). 

After that they took me to my apartment. 

My apartment building (Yes, it is called "For you Dream")

My room was left very clean and nice by the previous scholar. (Thanks Emily!) 

Here's a video tour of my apartment: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1HN7L2ZZFE&list=UUXpJR3J7-Vcplrlm96UZzcQ

(I can't get my videos to upload so I decided to put them on YouTube) 

This is the area where I live. 5 minute walk to the Bus station, 5 minute walk to E-mart(similar to Walmart)

It was a Thursday when I got to Mokpo. I just kinda relaxed and organized my stuff for the first few days. Then on Sunday I went to check out the local ward. It is a ward about the size of the branch in Vancouver. They are nice people. The next Monday I went to school but didn't start classes till the following week. 

I met a few other TaLK scholars that live in my same building or right across the street. Even though my apartment is about 40 minutes from school I think it is worth it to live in the city. 

Mokpo is a small city of only about 250,000 people (that is more than Boise or Salt Lake). There are about 40 cities in South Korea that have a bigger population that Mokpo. It is a port city in southwest Korea and I heard it is the 2nd biggest port city in Korea after Busan. 

In Korea it seems that every building has either a restaurant, convenient store, or cellphone service shop on the bottom floor. Honestly, economically I don't know how they all stay open because these 3 kinds of stores are everywhere. 

The restaurants here are pretty cheap and groceries here are pretty expensive so I have found that it is almost cheaper to just eat out. Plus it is definitely more convenient. Anyway, there are probably 30 or more restaurants within a 5 minute walk of my apartment. Like I said, I don't know how they all survive. 

I always eat lunch at school. They have really good food. I have found that cafeteria food here isn't thought about the same way as in America. I think in America no one likes to eat cafeteria food if they can avoid it. So usually the food is really good. I do eat a lot more seafood here than I did in Canada. We have a lot of dishes that involve fish or some kind of _______(insert sea creature). I would say I eat some kind of seafood on a daily basis. Oh also in Korea, the principal and all the teachers/ school workers eat lunch in the school cafeteria with the students. So that's cool because in America it seems very rare for teachers to eat lunch in the cafeteria. At least from what I can remember. 

My school is pretty small. Each grade has one teacher and then there are a few other teachers for other subjects (English, calligraphy, P.E., art, music, etc.) Including lunch ladies and secretaries I think the total staff at our school is probably about 25 people. In total, kindergarten through 6th grade there are about 100 students. 

I have at least one English class for every grade. This is my classroom:

It is nicely equipped with a touchscreen T.V. that is hooked up to my computer, so that comes in handy. All this fancy equipment and yet I still have a chalkboard (Not complaining but I'm pretty sure all the other rooms in the school have white boards).

Anyway, everyday I take a bus at 11:30 and I get to my school at about 12:15. Then I eat lunch. 

My teaching schedule is as follows: 

In the 6th grade class on Tuesday and the 5th grade class on Friday I am just a co-teacher and another teacher actually teaches. 

After I finish teaching I stay at the school till 5 then I get a ride home with the 5th grade teacher who lives is Mokpo. 

On Wednesdays, after my 1 class, all the teachers meet in the gym and we play volleyball. Koreans are pretty crazy about volleyball, which is totally ok with me because I love playing volleyball. Everyone is pretty decent so it makes it fun.

Teaching is crazy. The kids are not nearly as disciplined as you would think young Asian kids would be. Some days are better than others. Overall I enjoy it, it can just be really frustrating when the kids don't even care. I think it is hard for them to realize why they need to learn English. When you don't see a need to learn something you aren't going to try very hard to learn it. So I have been thinking about doing a lesson on how English will help them in life. 

Disciplining them is hard because If I say something in English they just ignore me and I don't really know how to be mean in Korean. As a missionary we only learned how to be nice and polite in Korean, now I need phrases like "Sit down and shut up!" However, I am learning more everyday about how to get their attention and make them listen. I just don't know how my friends that don't know any Korean even get by.

Another difficulty is that it is hard to plan for lessons because I'm not sure what the children already have been taught. For example the first graders are more advanced than I thought they would be. I planned to teach them the letter A and when I went to class they already knew the whole alphabet, and not just the song but they can recognize and point out each letter.

Also, as a new teacher, I'm not really sure what the school expects of me yet so there is that difficulty too. 

Overall, it has been a great experience and despite those difficulties I am really enjoying it. I'm sure as I get more experience teaching it will become easier as well. 

By the way, my schools name is Gurim Elementary and it is in Yeongam County that's how I got the name for my blog. 

Gwangju Field Trip

While we were in Gwangju for our provincial orientation we got to go on a cool field trip.
First we went to a memorial. In the 1980 there was a military coup that took over the South Korean government and in Gwangju there was huge resistance so they sent in the military and shut down the city and all the roads in and out. There were uprisings and the military started beating and shooting people, some of the people were even innocent and weren't involved in the uprisings. Its called the May 18th Democratic Uprising. Anyway, this event was the beginning of the democratization of the country. It led to several other uprisings in the 80s that eventually led to democracy.
Now they have a huge memorial for the victims of the massacre. It is crazy to see that this stuff was going on just 30 years or so ago. Before coming here I didn't know much about Korean history after the Korean war. One of our lectures was on Korean history of the last hundred years or so. It was very interesting to learn about the progression of the government and also the economy.

It is also a national cemetery and everyone who was killed in the massacre is buried there. Those who participated in the resistance and uprising who have died since are buried there as well. There was also a really cool museum but I didn't get any pictures of it.
After the memorial we went to a performance. They did various traditional Korean songs and dances. It was really cool except we had to sit on the floor and it was almost a 2 hour performance so by the time it was over I couldn't feel my legs, but other than that it was awesome.

Our whole group with the cast.

After the performance we jumped back on the buses and headed to a Bamboo forest. It was kinda cool. Just a big hill of huge bamboo shoots with trails running through it. They also had a souvenir shop in the midst of the bamboo where we bought some bamboo ice cream. It was really good. 

(Went to take this picture and Paul decided to turn around)

My co-teacher, me, and my roommate and his co-teacher enjoying bamboo ice cream.

After the Bamboo Forest they took us to dinner at a pretty fancy restaurant. We had a whole 7 course meal. It was really good. 

They gave us our rice in bamboo cups, that was kinda cool.

 On the last day of provincial orientation we had a ceremony where people from our individual schools came to pick us up and take us to our apartments, schools, etc. My mentor teacher (teacher that is in charge of helping me out with anything I need) and my vice principal came to pick me up.
Anyway we had to perform for them to try and impress them. Half of us sang and the other half played Korean instruments. I didn't get to play a cool instrument but that ok because they had to practice really hard for several days in a row and our practices were pretty short and simple and I already knew the song so it was no pressure. Well no pressure until they decided I should do a solo. Yes Layne! I sang...again. ;).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQDjjd2-XgM 

Here is the cooler performance which I wasn't a part of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rj-WsZYqVg
It's really long so I can't believe they learned that whole thing in 4 days. 

Practicums: Oh What Fun!

Ok this post wont have so much food ;).
Being in Jochiwon for the first 3 weeks was great but seemed a bit monotonous at times. However, we did have practicums (teaching practices) which I think were helpful. For our first practicum we worked in groups of 2 or 3 and we prepared a lesson plan and we taught it to real kids in a real school. We ended up with 3rd grade and the kids were actually very well behaved. It turned out better than we expected. Kendall actually ended up teaching 6th grade and he had a fight in his class and afterwards he was a little traumatized. So I got lucky I think. It was good to get a feel of what a real classroom was like.

 Here's me teaching.                          These are the other 2 scholars I taught with.                                                                 (we taught animals, hence the cat whiskers)

We had 2 more practicums but for those we just had to teach each other and pretend like we were teaching real kids. They were still pretty stressful though because we were graded and judged on how well we did. 

The first one was solo teaching and the second one was co-teaching. Here is me during my co-teaching lesson:

At this point this was the longest/thickest i had ever grown my beard. (I'm pretty sure the ladies dug it)

The worst part about practicums was that we weren't teaching real kids so it was hard for it to be realistic. Also it was very tiring trying to act like a little kid when other were teaching (we had to be their students). It sounds like fun, and it was for the first few lessons, but it got old pretty quick.

Other than practicums we did try to have some fun.
For one of our lectures we had 20 minutes to make an English video and the group with the best video from each class won a prize. Our group won! I wasn't able to upload the video, it was kinda lame anyway but still pretty good for coming up with the idea and shooting it and editing it, all in 20 minutes.
Anyway our prize was 2 tickets each to the "Color Me Rad" fun run! So when the run comes to Gwangju sometime this summer I will get to go for free. The reason we got free tickets is because that lecturer is actually the one who brought the "Color Me Rad" fun run to Korea. (Sidenote: She is Mormon and graduated from BYU).
Anyway, another group in our class made a really funny video about a dictator type teacher. So we decided to make a longer version for the talent show that was upcoming (That's why it is called Mr. Kim is back). Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzay3WI2I_s

A girl (Cheryl) also asked me to sing with her in the talent show. She had been looking for a guy to sing the male part of A Whole New World from Aladdin. So I gave in and said I would do it. I even got my K-pop teacher to help us out on our parts.

The talent show was on our last night in Jochiwon. I was pretty nervous and we had a few hiccups in our performance but it turned out ok. First, they had my mike turned way down, then once they got that fixed, I was worried that Cheryl was going to trip over my cord and I totally forgot one of the lines to the song. Anyway here is our performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGjjepfz5vU
(Oh btw: I shaved that night because I wanted to look nice for when we met our provincial coordinators). 

The next day we had a closing ceremony and we all said goodbye to each other and everyone was crying. We all jumped on our various buses and headed to our provincial orientations. My province is called Jeonnam or Jeollanam-do. Our provincial orientation was more of the same. Lots of lectures and practicums. We stayed at a business conference center that had a cafeteria and dorm rooms. It was in Gwangju, the 6th largest city in South Korea. Out of the 120 TaLK scholars that were in Jochiwon, 25 of us our assigned to the Jeonnam province. So there were 25 there in Gwangju. It was about a week long and we mostly just stayed in the dorms and worked on lesson plans and things. We did go out a couple times and had some fun. I'll write about that in my next post!