Inefficiency is my new friend

I made it through my first week! After all is said and done, it went pretty well. I still don’t have curriculum and books for the students, but I was told they will be here Monday. I will believe it when I see it. Again, I was reminded of how change occurs here every day. Already, we have had three major changes in how we run things, changing from just a day before. One is the weekly reports, which we all completed, just to be told the next morning they are not being used anymore. I finally came to the realization that I can’t plan more than one day in advance, because it will most likely change.
Despite the changes, my homeroom class is wonderful! I may be a little bias, but I feel my class is the best of the 6 year old classes. They are even trying to teach me a little Korean. Every day they try and teach me a new word. Due to my lack of language understanding, I am doing quite poorly. I am still trying to master saying hello the correct way! It is a humbling experience having 6 year old teach you how to say hello and break it down syllable by syllable.
There are 4 classes, and we rotate throughout the day. We quickly discovered Toriann’s class does not speak ANY English! Because of this we use hands motion all day to explain ideas and tasks to the children and have found ourselves using these motions when speaking to adults too. The other afternoon Toriann told me it was raining, while using her hands to motion down rain. We laughed about it, but then realized we all do it now without even thinking about it. So, if I come home and begin motioning everything out with my hands, you know why. Despite the fact that Toriann’s children do not speak English, they are still a sweet group of kids. We both have stated we have the best of the 6 year classes.

Our day begins with snack, then we rotate between four classrooms; reading (me), math/science (Toriann), writing (Casey) and theme (Gorden). Theme is basically choosing a topic of the week and doing various activities around it. The classes also rotate at the end of the day between 5 electives; drama, art, gym, storytelling and golf. Storytelling takes place in the student’s homeroom class, I have Gorden’s class one day a week too because he teaches drama.
The school provides a lunch for both us and the students. This has been a good introduction to Korean food. So far I have found quite a bit of food that I enjoy, and a few I now know to avoid. There is another teacher there who is allergic to shell fish, so they do not serve our two classrooms any shell fish products. This is very helpful because I am never really sure what I am eating. I am still trying to figure out what and where to eat outside of school, there are so many choices and so little English, it makes it hard! We have already found two Mexican places.
The end of the day is perhaps the most frustrating part of my day. We have to get three floors of students down one elevator and on the correct buses. There are about 120 students total at the school, ages varying between 4-7. Also, in Korean culture you take your outside shoes off and put on inside shoes, thus adding one more thing to do in the hallway. By the third day of school they decided to separate the children by bus numbers, meaning I would take down all the children on bus #2 from my floor. This sounds like a good idea in theory, except for now it means every class is ready at the same time to go to the elevator. It sounds like it really shouldn’t be that stressful, but it truly is. The fact that not all students speak English, and you have to get their shoes on them, and not confuse them with the other 20 or so children in the hallway, it gets crazy. Then you travel downstairs on the elevator, when it is actually free, and have to figure out which bus is the number 2. I have one boy who I am pretty sure is autistic, or at the very least extremely obsessive compulsive. By the time we got to the bus yesterday, he was so stressed out he was repeating the same thing over and over again to himself. I assume he was doing this as some defense mechanism, although I have no idea what he was saying since it was all in Korean. All of us English teachers have many ideas about how to make this run more efficient, but of course we are not allowed to say, or even if we do, we are dismissed. Again, lack of efficiency here is beyond frustrating to me.
This inefficiency is also why we don’t have internet yet, but we are hoping to have it this week. The process of how things are done from year to year with new teachers changes, so the information you receive from a past teacher is almost guaranteed to be wrong. I have always considered myself a flexible person when it comes to my work environments, but I think this year will definitely challenge me.
This weekend I plan on exploring a little more of my neighborhood, which I am quickly discovering is huge. And to learn how to use my washing machine!