English Camp!
Last Thursday I finished the booklet for the English Camp, which started today. My co-teacher, Gyong Jin added some Korean explanatory text and that’s it. Friday I took it pretty easy, got up when I got up, had a leisurely breakfast and then, a shower. Then, I went to the school to check my email. The weekend was quiet. There are no malls here that play the same old Christmas songs over and over and over again and Christmas day it was +10 or +12 and sunny. So, it really didn’t feel like Christmas and for me that was a good thing. On Saturday night I was tempted to go buy a bottle of wine and have a glass for Christmas Eve, but decided not to risk it and another bout of criminal poetic vomitous.
On Sunday I did do something a little different…I practiced playing “You Are My Sunshine” on the guitar because I knew I’d have to play it in front of the class on the first day of the English Camp on Monday morning. I must be insane! I’ve never played and sung in front of 25 people before! What’s the worst that can happen? I won’t be singing alone anyway – the students will be accompanying me.
The first day of the English Camp went very well. At first I was nervous because as I had it scheduled there didn’t seem to be enough to fill the first 40 minute session this morning, but I thought on feet and came up with some extra stuff to pad it out. We started with them singing the A-B-C song, and then doing a slow run through the alphabet concentrating on their pronunciation. They have a particular problem pronouncing ‘R’, ‘F’ and ‘V’. To them ‘V’ sounds like ‘B’, and ‘R’ just doesn’t exist in their language, so it’s alien to them. They are doing better than I am with Korean…there are some sounds in Korean that I doubt I’ll ever be able to get my tongue around. As I was going through the alphabet and having them come up with words for each letter, hard and soft, long and short, I came up with words and expressions that I thought might interest them, i.e. To be fond of something or someone, and homonyms like ‘son’ and ‘sun’.
I managed to pad things out so that there wasn’t any dead air. After that we covered nouns and verbs, definitions and examples. Then, we came to the entertainment part of the thing. I went to the nearby teacher’s room and got my guitar. They “Oo-ed and Aw-ed” when they saw it. I sat down and started warming my fingers up with “Greensleeves”, then started singing “You Are My Sunshine”. We all sang it a few times and then towards the end of the class and the day, at 13:00, a film crew from the local affiliate of KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) doing a news story or something came into the class and filmed me and the kids singing. Oh great! Now there’s conclusive evidence of my condition. They interviewed one of the students but the language barrier prevented them from interviewing me. Too bad I had learned to say, “I like it here” in Korean (Naw moon-a maoolmeh tuhr-awyo). Oh well!
After the big Korean Tv debut the vice-principal of the school took a few of us to lunch. I’m still eating a light, but mostly western breakfast, like cereal, or toast. For lunch I usually eat a larger meal of traditional Korean food. Supper I usually make, but it’s usually something really simple like noodles in a cup, or some rice and kimchi. The head cook at the school gave me a couple of jars of kimchi and some other fermented vegetable. Sometimes for a snack I’ll have a rice cake or bag of microwave popcorn. One more note about eating Korean style...it's communal. That is, a dozen or so dishes are put on the table, some of them are just for you, like the rice, and the soup, and some of them are for everyone.
The kids are basically on holiday till February. If there wasn’t an English Camp they would stay home I think. Their parents may have paid for them to attend the Camp. I’ll have 4 groups of roughly 20 kids in each. 1 group each week, (5 days a week for 4 weeks) from 9:00-13:00. After that I’m on winter break from January 21-31. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’d like to take some kind of a tour of Korea or at least of this area in Geongnam Province.
After that it’s back to regular classes except I’ll be going to a different school every day. I haven’t been to any of the other schools yet, but think that this one, Chilwon Elementary, will always be my favourite. We’ll see. I’ll take the time I have from 13:00 to 17:00 to develop or find some lesson plans. How to keep things from getting boring?
Time for bed. I've come to love my electric blanket. My bedroom is a comfortable 15 degrees, and while that's pretty good for me to sleep I find it even better when the bed is nice and warm. I set the blanket on high about 15 minutes before bed and then on 3 when I'm ready for bed. Perfect!!
G'night.
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