So, winter English camp is here. It's going ok, but not quite as fun and stimulating as I had hoped. My friend Anne is here to teach with me, as my school had enough money for 2 teachers. The camp didn't start off on a positive note, as when we arrived at school an hour before the first day of camp, my co-teacher tells us that the English teachers had met a couple weeks ago and decided that we should read 2 books with the students during the camp, which is only 2 weeks long. Ok..... , I thought, I guess we can incorporate that. Well, turns out the books they wanted us to read were Pride and Prejudice and Old Man and the Sea. Now, I've never read P&P, but I just watched the movie and the British TV series a couple weeks ago and I have been wanting to read the book. .... but not for English camp! These are high school boys, and even though they are the most advanced of my students, their English is nowhere near good enough to read P&P in a semester, let alone a week!! I had higher hopes for OMS, since it is a relatively low level vocab book, even though it has some more advanced underlying themes and ideas (which I planned to just skip). Well, to make a long story short, both books were too hard and it would be impossible to cover one of them in the 2 weeks, let alone 2. So, Anne and I decided to abandon the book-reading part of camp. And, on top of that, the students were telling us they wanted to be practicing conversation, not reading. I whole heartedly agree!! But the teachers told us they want us to spend half of the classes on reading. Ay yi yi. Well, we have decided to do short stories with them everyday.
Besides this, camp hasn't been quite what I thought it would be. These students are great kids, but they still aren't amazing students (and I know I have high standards). The second graders are much better at speaking English than the first, so things aren't so bad with them. But the first graders just aren't really able to carry on a conversation very well. This isn't super shocking, as there was a big disparity between the first and second graders' levels last semester in my class. Anyway, already 4 of the 10 days are done for camp, and I've survived! :-P Tomorrow night Anne and I are going to go out to dinner with the 2nd grade class and then noraebang'ing (karaoke) with them. Then 2 of Anne's friends living in Busan temporarily for an internship will drive over to Suncheon and meet up with us for some drinking (I don't know any of the bars here in Suncheon though, I'm such a loser!). And THEN the 4 of us are going down to Yeosu for the weekend. Should be pretty fun!
Oh yeah, and I have some awesome news. I bought a ticket to Japan for the end of Feb!! So between that and my trip to SE Asia, I will only be home for 4 days in all of February. It should be divine!! :-)
I'll wrap up with a quote from a friend of mine who is a fellow ETA here (will keep the name anonymous for their sake). I think it hits the nail on the head for our lives here in Korea:
"i love living in a country where people care more about whether or not i finish my fuckin' rice then worry about telling me about something really big" (aka important)
That's all for now, chick-a-dees. I gotta get my butt to bed, so I can drag it back outta bed in the morning for swimming!
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