Teaching in Korea

Well, I was looking over my blog and I realized that I haven't mentioned too much about what I'm doing here teaching wise. Thusly, I've decided to give you a little overview of my school and what I'm doing there.

My school has 8 foreign teachers, 4 of which hail from Chatham Ontario, one comes from St. Louis Missouri, then there's one from England and one from Ireland and then me from Belleville.
Each class we teach we are paired up with a Korean teacher. Us foriegn teachers teach in English (obviously) and then the Korean teachers teach them grammar and help them understand difficult English words by descrbing it to them in Korean. So our classes are split up into 2 40 min sections for the kids... one in English and one in Korean.
A typical work day has me at school at around 11:00 and on MWF I teach straight from 1:00pm to 8:15 pm with no breaks, but you'd be surprised at how fast time flies by.

The class sizes range from 5-12 kids and you teach children from age 6 (Korean age) to 16. For those of you who don't know, Koreans base their age off of their birth year. So since I was born in 1981 I am 24 right now and once January rolls around then I'll be 25.

The lessons I have are all pretty much laid out for me. I have to photocopy some supliments like colouring pages for the younger children, but pretty much it's all laid out for me.

Time right now in Korea is 13hrs ahead of time in Ontario and once daylight savings rolls around, it'll be 14 hrs ahead. Korea doesn't do daylight savings.

Hopefully I'll have some pictures soon. I'll have to go up to Seoul to buy a camera. I brought along one, but I forgot to bring along the hook-up. Also prices are ridicuously cheap here. One of my fellow teachers was up in Seoul a few weeks ago and bought a 7 megapixle camera for just over 200,000 won (about $200 US or $250 cdn)
and had a 1 gig memory stick and an extra battery thrown into the package. I can't wait till I can get up there and check out what electronic goodies they have. Unfortunately I don't get paid until 8 days after the session ends, so I've been pretty much living off of the money I brought along with me.

Well, I hope this gives you a better insight of how life in Korea is going. I'll write more soon.