Oh, and BTW, I'm putting in a lot of "extra" detail in all of these posts, partially because I know I'll forget some of this later and will probably one day want to remember, and also partially because the next crew of EPIK teachers will be blog surfing for information like I did prior to arriving. Hopefully, they will find this somewhat helpful.
So... I think I told you about the medical exam last time... Well, after that we had the "Opening Ceremony" and then a "Welcoming Dinner" which was actually just extra food at the cafeteria, which was fine with me. I was kind of disappointed overall with the food at the cafeteria every day. Most days the only things on the menu that were truly Korean was the Kimchi and sometimes the soup. And unfortunately, for most teachers, this was their first time to Korea. I guess getting thrown into the deep end foodwise might be okay...
That was Thursday, the day after all of us "arrived" at the airport. It seemed that a lot of people arrived up to a week early to hang out and adjust though. Every day after that (excluding Sunday) we were busy from 7:30 in the morning until 8 at night. We had breakfast from 7:30am until 8:40am, then two classes from 9:00am (but had to be in the room to sign for attendence by 8:50am) until 12:20pm (with a twenty minute break in between classes and sometimes a break in the actual class as well). The lunch ran from 12:30pm until 1:40pm, and we had two more classes from 2:00pm (with signing for attendence 10 minutes early again) until 5:20pm. Dinner went from 5:30pm until 6:40pm. Excluding the day for the medical check and the last day we gave lesson demonstrations, we had four full days of classes and then one day dedicated to a field trip. Three of the four days of classes, we also had Korean language classes which ran from 6:50pm until 8:00pm. And somewhere in between all that we were asked to prepare our lesson with our co-teaching team of three people. LOL. But it was okay. It made for some long days, but I know our Korean team leaders worked even harder. All the classes had a pair of Korean team leaders who made sure we were all there, we knew what to do and when, prepared materials for us and were there to support us. One of our team leaders told me that he had stayed up the previous night until 2am preparing for our next day!
I really liked most, if not all, of the lectures, although it was a lot of information to process, LOL. Our field trip was on Sunday to Yongin Korean Folk Village, which I have been to previously in May 2012. I thought, for some reason, the name was Hanok Folk Village, but no... it was the exact same village. LOL. It was fun though, and we got to make some pottery. I kind of would have rather walked around, but making pottery was nice too. I don't remember what time we had to be on the buses, but the schedule says 8:40, although I'm sure it was earlier. Anyway, the trip was from around then, until around 5pmish when we got back to campus. Then we had dinner and some of us went out and some of us worked on our presentations. We presented on Wednesday, Feb 27th. My team was last to go (Lesson 9 - Comparatives) and surprisingly our class voted our team the best lesson demo! We got little bookmarks with the EPIK logo.
After the demos we had a closing ceremony, during which a very cute video with pictures and videos of all of us that were taken during the entire orientation was shown. I tried to capture the video on my camera... but I ran out of memory! :*(
I had thought about it previously, but I forgot since I was busily preparing the lesson plan, but during the orientation I decided we needed to get a thank you gift or something for our Korean team leaders... But I didn't know what until halfway through the closing ceremony. I had a firm idea, but I was cutting it really close since after the closing ceremony our class would go our separate ways. I asked Jack if he had a class roster so we could find everyone... Nope. So Jack, Vanessa, and I rushed out to the in-building convenience store and found some materials (two small notebooks, colored markers, and post-its) to make a thank you notebook for each of our leaders. Everyone had gone to dinner by the time we got done, so we sought out all our classmates in the crowded cafeteria and got everyone to sign a post-it: yellow stars for justin and pink apples for Kei. Except we had so many student/teachers in our class (52) that we ran out of post-its, that people just started writing in the book. Justin posted this to his facebook. I'm assuming the left hand side is the thank yous from the EPIK staff.
Isn't he cute? :D
We finished it up quickly in the cafeteria since Kei and Justin said they might not see us in the morning... It was pretty humorous since we were trying to keep it a secret from them, but the table that we ended up signing it at was right next to theirs.... LOL. Every once in a while Justin seemed a bit curious as to what we were doing, but one of us always distracted him. There were many pictures taken that night. :D We also took a video of us presenting the notebooks to them. It was PRICELESS. Justin (SO ADORABLE) started tearing up a bit. Neither one could read the notebook while we were there. But I'm just glad that they liked it.I need to get going. More to come on the move, co-teacher, school and other moving stuff.
Much love from the ROK!
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