Week in review (part one)

Another busy week, so I have a lot to write about!  Instead of doing one very long entry, I'm going to do two entries, one now and another one later.

The week was pretty good as far as teaching is concerned.  I have come across one road block.  In one of my afternoon classes, I have a student who is very young, maybe even too young to be at school.  At the oldest he is four, and is possibly younger.  He has been crying almost every class out of nowhere.  Now, dealing with a four year old with a temper tantrum is hard enough, but with an extra challenge added when you do not speak the same language as they do as a first language.  Thankfully, my supervisor has been very helpful in helping me deal with this kid and told him that he can't cry for no reason like that, otherwise we can't help him.  Hopefully he will be better next week.  The kids in my kindergarden class continue to be cute everyday.  In one of my other afternoon classes, the kids have decided that they are going to tell me happy birthday everyday, and on Wednesday they hid under the table and when I walked in the room jumped out and said, "Happy Birthday!" even though I had told them on Monday my birthday isn't until November.  That class also got a kick out of me saying some Korean words and asked me to say them over and over again.  I didn't comply with the request.

This week I also got to be a "doctor."  On Thursday, the kids spent most of the morning getting a mini-medical check-up from the teachers turned doctors. (They even had white coats for us and everything.)  We were in charge of checking height, weight, hearing and color blindness.  I was in charge of weight and used an impractical scale that made me enter their age, gender, and height before they could step on the scale.  The hearing test that was done was also kind of impractical, using tuning forks in wooden blocks, and since most of the kids don't really know the difference between left and right it didn't work too well. The color blindness test was also pre-dispositioned for failure, as the numbers like 74 and 85 the kids didn't know.  What the teacher ended up doing was blocking one of the numbers so they wouldn't have to try such high numbers.

This week I also finally transferred my phone to my name, so I could put money on it. (Had to wait until I got my Alien Registration Card to do this.)  The woman at the cell phone place didn't speak any English, but was dedicated to helping me and called someone who spoke Korean and English to translate for her.  I was really impressed with how helpful she was and she got everything done.

That's all for part one.  Part two coming later!