tales from Korea

The three week long winter camp is nearly at an end. It went by pretty quickly, a lot of feelings about the success of the camp I’ll keep firmly in my head and off the Internet. But, I can always talk about the great things that happened, and the greatest thing for me was my brilliant class. Each class was expected to have between 8-10 students, mine had 8 originally but two dropped out on the first day leaving me with a tidy six. The class bonded together very quickly – Three of the students are from the same school, two other girls are both aspiring artists with similar interests and took a liking to each other on the first day. The last boy kinda forced himself to fit in, I’m sure you can tell from the photo above which one he is.

Quotes

Some of my favourite quotes and things that happened during the camp:

“Teacher, don’t Vikings still exist?”
“Yes, that’s one reason I came to Korea, to escape the murder and pillage”.
“Ahh really teacher? Wow… like the pirates I read about in the news”.
“Young Mu – I’m joking! The Vikings were around about 1000 years ago!”

When writing about the movie Saving Private Ryan, one student wrote the directors name as Steven Smallbug.

“Teacher I love you, and I love your fashion”.

One of the students wrote ‘Paul is legend’ on the board.

“Teacher, are there blacks in Ireland?”

“Teacher – I know about RIA!”
“I think you mean IRA.”

When acting out a performance, one girl shouted at her ‘boyfriend’ [pointing at another girl] “You sleep?! You sleep?!”.

“Students, listen up, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate this lesson?” [not my lesson!]

“0″, “-10″, “Boring”, ”1″, “Can’t rate – too horrible”, “바보”.

Give me 5 new years resolutions, one student is obsessed with GG:
1. Meet Girls Generation.
2. Hug Girls Generation.
3. Kiss Girls Generation.
4. Shake hands with Girls Generation.
5. Marry Girls Generation.

[Maybe more if I can remember...]

The camps end: The performance

On the last day of the camp is the ‘performance’ the students have been working on for 20 minutes a day. Three weeks to prepare something may sound like a lot but it really isn’t. I like my classes ambition, though. They chose to do something a little different, they wanted to do something Irish, since that’s where their teacher’s from. After showing a few scary videos of Irish dancing and Michael Flatly, we found a Ceili dance that’s relatively easy to perform. At this stage, they have it down pretty well. Well, they have the movement and pace of the dance, the footwork is more like skipping but still, I’m impressed. I’ll upload the video of the performance after Friday.

Update: The performance video.

First Place!

My class won first place in the performance competition – beat back the beatles, Grease (Sorry Jeremy!) and some plays! Very happy, they worked hard for it and pulled off a good performance. I think I was more nervous then they were.

In some ways it almost makes me sad to think of going back to the 28-35 sized classrooms in my own school when the new semester starts. The noise and discipline problems, seeing them once a week – you can’t really build any sort of relationship with the students. I got to know these six students better in this short time then any of the students in my own school. Hopefully I can change that a little when I go back for next semester.