Life Amongst These Rice Paddies

The dear Song family must have turned off their wireless network so now I can’t swipe anyone’s internet at home. I hope it's just not working and they get it fixed, cause why pay for something when you can use someone elses? Hehe. I totally live in Asia.

People joke that Cedarville is surrounded by corn fields- because it is. People at ICS joke that our school is surrounded by rice paddies, because it is. We have a rule that the kids can’t play with any balls at recess until the rice is harvested. But the school is not really in the middle of nowhere; it is on the outskirts of Pyeongtaek and you can see some of the city buildings from the school.

The side of ICS and a rice paddy

I'm looking forward to the day I can get far enough ahead that I'm not doing stuff for school every waking moment. But until then, I'll write another post about school. We just finished our second week of school, and I gained two kids in my classes and lost three. All the kids’ schedules were so messed up this year for some reason, and it didn’t help that half of them didn’t actually look at their schedules, they just followed their friends to class.

My Spanish I class is by far my favorite so far. All the kids are a lot of fun and participate in everything without me having to prod them. They do like to talk a lot and I've given out a few demerits, but they're not too bad yet. I've had 3 other teachers come to me and ask me either how to say "be quiet" in Spanish or to stop teaching Spanish because the kids only wanted to speak Spanish in their other classes. I was like, bring it on. We played Uno with colors and numbers last week and it was a hit. I gave an oral test on Friday, and when I said the rest of them could have a study hall when it wasn't their turn, they all wanted to play Uno in Spanish again.

Spanish II is frustrating because the kids don't really know anything and keep failing things (they're not real into trying). Math is going fairly well now when I remember to do some of the problems ahead of time (I had to write long division problems on my hand one day so it would look like I was doing it right) but geography is very hard to teach since I have 3 kids who basically speak only Japanese or Korean, two 8th graders who took the class last year on the other end, and other 7th and 8th graders in the middle. Monday night I spent 3.5 hours with another teacher after school trying to get some kind of game plan for the next couple weeks that can accomodate all of them.

A few people have asked about our students... Unlike the school in Seoul, most our students aren't the kids of diplomats. Most of ours have parents from 2 different countries, either Korea and another asian country, or Amerasian (have an American dad but an Asian mom). There are a couple girls with a black American dad and a Korean mom, and they are gorgeous. The Amerasian kids like the school since they aren't really accepted by the other kids in Korean schools. I have a few full Korean students who have foreign passports, a couple Japanese kids, a couple Chinese from Hong Kong and Malaysia, a few Americans, a German kid, and a guy from Thailand. I think that's about it... the elementary has a few more nationalities.

I know there are some (like me) that were concerned this school would be like the one I was at in Thailand. Don't worry, it's different. Our director is crazy and he has a strange mustache but he and the other teachers have been very supportive of me and the other new people. He knows I have a ridiculous set of classes and told me if I find it's too much he'll find a way for me to have a little more free time at school. We'll see how things settle down. Actually, this week I kicked him out of his own house so I could talk to his wife :^) So that was my week in a nutshell... until next time...