Part the Second

Sorry it took a week to get this second part up. I hope you all lived.

Fortunately for you, I am sitting in front of my computer, putting off making powerpoint after powerpoint for my lessons this week. So hooray blogging! It keeps me from doing my job.

SO. When we left off, I had just had a very pleasant weekend in Seoul, bumming around the place, and was about to embark upon my three day training camp with 199 other elementary English teachers from all over Gyeonggi-do.

It was quite a mixed bag...on the one hand, there were a couple informative lectures and one or two interesting people. On the other, there were a lot of boring-ass lectures and tons of seriously creepy individuals. Also, many people from South Africa (those last two are not related! I quite like my South African friends).

The good lectures were...good. The two that helped me the most happened on the second day of training, and while the lecturers weren't the greatest, they were at least entertaining. I got some good ideas for introducing active participation in my class, and some REALLY good ideas for classroom management, especially for the young kids.

The big problem with the lectures, for me, was the excessively high number of "lecture pumas" in attendance. Lecture pumas, for those of you who are not familiar with the term, are those individuals who take advantage of question time in a lecture to ask a question that is usually a) only VERY tangentially to the subject at hand, b) INCREDIBLY specific to that person's situation (and thus not particularly useful to the group), and c) very easily answered or intuited. These people are very closely related to conversation pumas, and make for exceedingly awful lectures during which I play games on my cell phone, sitting in the back.

I didn't actually play games on my phone (at least not while people were actually lecturing). But I did play dots with Ilana...it reminded me of HSEV 101 freshman year at CUA. Miss you, Jill!

The big upshot of this training center, job-wise, is that I left feeling much more confident as a teacher and ready to get back into the classroom. I also got several props on my teaching style during our demo lesson, both from other teachers and our evaluators. I still think my partner and I should have gotten best teachers - our game was WAY more fun than the brushing teeth business that the winners did. Whatevs.

Of course, there was much more to take away from the training camp than just new education confidence. Namely, I came away as king of all trivia (a talent which I most certainly inherited from my mother, who still routinely schools me in Jeopardy!). What happened was this: one of the teachers decided to organize a pub quiz sort of thing on Monday night, with some secret under the table gambling (each team of five tossed in 5000W as an entry fee, the winner takes the pot). It was 20 questions on various subjects, evenly spread out amongst the official GEPIK countries (US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) and some hodgepodge questions. So 20 questions + 5 bonus questions = max score of 25. Guess whose team got a 23? Ya damn right. So that was a quick 9000W to toss in my pocket.

But there was a catch: the winning team also had to agree to host the pub quiz the next night.

I think I have found my new calling. Some of the questions were probably too hard, but the idea is that you shouldn't know everything in a pub quiz, right? I reworked the format so it would be 5 categories with 4 questions each, plus a bonus attached to a question in each category. Working out the questions with my team was fun, and hosting the pub quiz was a blast - I'm definitely considering getting one started (perhaps on a once a month plan) here in Osan for the waygooks in the area.

So those were the highlights of my training camp...seriously you guys there are some weird-ass foreigner teachers in South Korea. Like a significant number of people who...worry me...to say the least.

In great news: the weather seems like it is finally starting to turn! Spring is arriving in quick fashion, the cherry trees are in bloom (making me miss DC even more), and green is coming to the country side. Oh, and I just bought a 1TB external hard drive for crazy cheap. Sweet.