As you may have guessed from my earlier post discussing a trip to the Uijeongbu immigration office I recently renewed my contract with our academy for a third year. This was a decision that I'd shared with our academy director two months ago - as stipulated in my contract - which left him looking equal parts excited and relieved. During the ( Read more... )

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Suwon, located just to the south of Seoul, is the capital of Gyeonggi-do and was the site of a large-scale demonstration yesterday. It seems the Provincial Office of Education is trying to enact legislation to limit how late middle school students can spend studying at school or after-school academies, called hagwons (학원) in Korea. The current ( Read more... )

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While nobody in my classes yesterday brought up the student who died over the weekend, it was a subject revisited by the group of girls who were most interested in the topic Monday. However, I'm starting to worry about the quiet girl who was the first to mention his death, as she's friends with the boy's sister. She looked distracted for most of ( Read more... )

The end of this week is when I need to submit my decision on whether I'll sign a third contract with my current institute or look for work elsewhere. The time has gone by a lot faster than I thought it would, although my original plan was to work here for three or four years before returning home for graduate school. Then again, it sounds like a ( Read more... )

Near the end of my final class on Monday I looked down at my right hand and noticed a dark red bubble of liquid located between the knuckles of my pointer and middle fingers. The brand of pen I use for correcting student workbooks tends to bleed heavily when the ink reservoir is running low, so the safe bet seemed to be that the pen was running ( Read more... )

Last week our academy vice-director came to the teacher's office to tell me that one of my students had recently received throat surgery and asked me not to call on her to speak in class if it could be avoided. She didn't mention the reason for the surgery although, considering how my student is in the fourth grade, it may be from a tonsillectomy. ( Read more... )

One of my lower level classes today started a lesson that introduces the numbers 11-20. Included in this unit is the format to ask about a quantity of something ("How many ______ do you have?"), and while the students didn't have any problems reading the examples from the student book they also didn't sound very enthusiastic. But oh, how the mood ( Read more... )

Even though I have been teaching English in Korea for the past nineteen months - and tutored Korean students in the United States prior to that - there are still plenty of times when I feel very reluctant to call myself a "teacher". Having an anthropology degree probably makes it easier to "fit in" and understand what's happening in the culture ( Read more... )