today

I actually started composing a post yesterday about visiting Rachel for her birthday a week ago and about last weekend, when I went to Seoul for a Thanksgiving dinner, and I finished up the post tonight, but somehow everything I wrote today was lost, so I'm putting that off for now and moving on to stuff that's a bit more fresh in my mind, since this school week so far has been pretty eventful itself. And I don't want to bore people with incredibly long posts.

I came back from Seoul late Sunday night, at first feeling a little morose as I often do (and have probably noted before) on the ride home. But when I got to the apartment, the family was all smiles and very welcoming, and I found myself relaxing pretty quickly. I had a funny conversation with Seo Jin, the youngest, last night over dinner. Seo Jin has a rabbit as a pet--he's basically wild, though he's come to get excited when people come near his cage because he thinks it means food. I don't really understand Seo Jin's disposition towards her pets (she used to have two hamsters in addition to the rabbit--she still has one); she seems to really dote on them but at the same time I think is sort of mean to them, reprimands them and such for not acting how she wants them to act, when I wouldn't really expect them to understand. I also worry about the rabbit because it seems hungry all the time, though my host dad usually picks lots of food for it when he's home on the weekends, and I feed it fruit peelings and stuff when I get the chance. Anyway, I've been wanting to liberate this rabbit for a long time. It was slated to go to live in the country with an aunt, but when Seo Jin discovered that it would probably eventually be eaten, she refused. When I visited Rachel's school she showed me the 'rabbit community' living on the school grounds---a bunch of rabbits living in a large fenced in area. Rachel thinks that originally they might have been part of some student project. We had the idea that maybe we could convince Seo Jin to let us bring her rabbit to Gochang to live happily with the other rabbits (though in reality, we weren't actually certain about how the rabbit would be received by the others--though I feel like if the rabbit himself could make a choice, he would probably take the risk of being attacked by his own kind then remaining in his cage). I carefully brought up the possible rabbit transfer at the dinner table last night, and Seo Jin seemed excited about the prospect but then announced that if the rabbit went to live in Gochang, the family would have to visit it once a month. So there goes that plan. It was a cute discussion, despite my worries for the rabbit.

So today, Tuesday, there were supervisors from the provincial education department at our school. I had been told about them last week, but I found out about certain last minute changes Monday afternoon, for instance, 1) I would be helping my desk neighbor, Ms. Hwang, in her English class that the supervisors were slated to visit, something which I've never done before, and 2) The supervisors would also be visiting one of my classes. As with the photo shoot last week, I wasn't really prepared for this. I ended up making up an entirely new lesson Monday afternoon, with no chance to try it out and see how it would go. I needed a new lesson because I didn't think my Pictionary lesson, which tended to get a bit unruly, would go over well with a supervisor. Ms. Hwang, who was I think much more nervous than I was--actually, all the regular English teachers were being observed and they didn't find out Saturday, until so they were all rushing around submitting lesson plans on Monday--explained to me a little about how I would be contributing to her class, but we didn't review it completely until this morning. We did a test run on her first period class. I read some material to the class and then helped it explain it to them after they read it themselves, though Ms. Hwang often translated my 'clarifications.' All in all everything went well though. The supervisors actually only dropped in on the second period class for maybe two minutes, and they neglected to come to my class at all. I think my school had decided that the supervisors should observe me, but they had many other classes to observe so they probably ran out of time.

It was interesting for me to observe Ms. Hwang's classes, and see what an average English class at my high school is like. It actually made me feel like my classes were too easy (as if that'd never crossed my mind before). But I also realized that my classes have ended up being tailored to the students with the lowest level, or often, simply the students with the lowest enthusiasm. When I see a student staring at me blankly or simply neglecting to do the assignment, I feel like the lesson was a failure. But Ms. Hwang's class seemed to operate more on the assumption that all the students could handle the lesson, though it involved a lot of reading comprehension, and I think a few of the students just didn't participate (I've noticed that a lot of the students are good at pretending to be reading right as you get near them, and since a lot of times the class just responds to the teacher in unison, they often don't have to formulate answers on their own). It made me wonder about my own class style. In some ways I think it is important that the lower level students don't fall between the cracks, but on the other hand all the students deserve to be challenged, and maybe I'm underestimating them. I think they certainly tend to underestimate themselves. Even though I don't necessarily think I should teach the sort of lessons Ms. Hwang does (and not being able to explain things for them in Korean often makes these kinds of lessons just infeasible) I do think that my sort of low-aiming approach isn't the best way to go. Or at least, I shouldn't consider a lesson a failure if some students aren't engaged or don't do original work, because I think some students, with an environment of thirty-plus students, won't really try or be engaged no matter what lesson I do. Anyway, I don't know if this realization will actually result in any significant changes in lessons, because the issues of feasibility haven't really changed, but it's something to think about. I think the winter break class I teach in January, when I will spend three hours a day for ten days with the same students, will be a good time to try out new tactics.

The class schedule has been wacky lately, so I'm actually teaching about three different lessons at the same time right now. Some classes I haven't seen in awhile, and they're still finishing up the movie I've been showing for the last couple weeks. There are actually a couple classes that haven't watched any of it yet. It's actually nice to have some variety though. Tomorrow is going to delay some classes further, as there's a Thanksgiving celebration. All the classes are going to compete in a choir competition and then we have the afternoon off (by decree of the minister, I heard). This weekend I'm going to stick around Suncheon. I've decided to try not to travel until I leave for Thailand on the 19th of December. I need to save up some money. Speaking of money, the won is at an all time high while the dollar is pretty low, so the exchange rate for won to dollar is pretty good right now. I plan to wire some money to my American bank account as soon as I get paid at the end of this month. Hopefully the won will still be high then--the Korean government has actually already taken action to curb it, and plans to do more, since the Korean economy depends so much on export, it actually hurts the country's business to have a strong won.

Reading: Finished "Mrs. Dalloway" and the dream book Rachel lent me, and now I'm reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It's hugely long, and it's sort of an old paper back so I think reading it is actually giving me allergy attacks, but I find it really interesting. It's sort of like a crash course on a lot of European history I never got.

P.S. Might be posting some recent photos from Seoul, and some older photos from my trip to Gwangju and hiking with Rachel that I just got developed, soon. So stay tuned.