School Stuff
This is how my classes operate. For the most part the boys sit here, and the girls sit there and never the twain shall meet (until high school). Classes where the teacher makes the kids sit boy-girl-boy-girl tend to be better than the ones where they separate into uni-sex clumps.
Overall the girls tend to be smarter, better prepared, neater, and more orderly than the boys. If I give a task and then turn my back to write something on the board for thirty seconds, by the time I turn back around the girls will all be diligently working on the task while the boys will be seeing which one can punch himself in the head the hardest.
I wish I were joking. But this is the norm at my schools.
For now I’m teaching at three schools. Mondays in a town called Hyenseo, Tuesday thru Thursday here in Andeok, and Fridays in a tiny village called Ijeon near Juwangsan National Park (watch out for those gnolls!) Ijeon has 21 students total, and there’s a spa facility attached to the school because of a skin condition endemic to that region.
Naturally small classes tend to go better than large classes. Even if 8 kids get unruly, it’s still only 8 kids (and giving unruly kids silly nicknames like "Frying Pan" and "Paper Clip" can keep them in line -- and amuse the whole class). What are giving me grief are my after school classes with 25+ students. Trying to keep three different grade levels of kids occupied for fifty minutes is near impossible for me at this moment. I hope to get better at it as time goes on.
We’ll see.
In other news Jin and I spent the weekend in Pohang. We did kind of feel like country bumpkins. I took some pictures of flowers.