You're a teacher, go teach

So far we have been addressing some of the things we were told coming into South Korea, and how they have played out so far. Unfortunately one of the things we were given very little information about was the job itself (this is laughable, I know).

We knew a couple of small details. We knew the name of the school, BIS (Brown International School), and we knew our classes would be no larger than 12 kids at once. From there, we had little clue about anything else. Were we going to be teaching together? How many classes would we end up having? How many total students would we have? What subjects would we be teaching? How old were the kids we would be teaching? What level of English were the children? Would there be a Korean translator in the room to help us out if we needed it? We were fairly clueless about all of these things.

We showed up Monday morning around 9:30 AM (schools starts at 10:00) not sure what to expect. We were given our schedule and the curriculum we would need for each class and told to "go teach". At this point my wife looked pretty calm, I'm sure I was a little green in the face and fairly panicked. Lauren's first period was thankfully a planning period. She would get a chance to look over the material before her first class. I, on the other hand, was fed to the wolves. I had kindergarten Earth Class.

There are three levels of kindergarten at the academy: Universe, Jupiter, and Earth. The Universe children are pretty incredible. They are amazingly bright and their English is very good. The Jupiter class is also quite smart, but their English vocabulary is just slightly smaller.

And then there is Earth.

Oh Earth.

Earth class is the "little to no English" class. So, here I am, never taught a day in my life, and I am supposed to go into this classroom with 6 Korean 5-year olds who know about 15 words of English and teach them math. Uh, excuse me? Now you can probably understand why I was a little green in the face and in panic mode.

I entered the classroom and sat down at their table while they all stared wide-eyed at me. "Good morning!!"...Silence..."How are you guys doing?...Silence...."oh boy this is going to be interesting"...silence.

After getting nowhere quick I decided that "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" would be the best way to get them moving. Thankfully, it worked. After a good couple rounds they were laughing and having fun. From there I was able to ask each of their names and open very small dialogue with them. We spent the rest of the class identifying shapes and singing more songs.

Quite an experience to say the least.

We'll try and capture some photos of the adorable kids to post.

More to come about the students/classes/schedules/curriculum/etc...