Hermès is coming to America

Exciting news: I just learned via one of the other Missouri camp instructors that our camp's star student, Hermès, will be traveling from Damyang, South Korea to the U.S. for a four-week visit!

Hermès was one of the students in Karolina's home room class. Since Karolina taught the Fashion class, most of her home room students had designer nicknames. In addition to Hermès, students included Calvin, Versace, and Coco.

If I can swing it, I'd love to road trip to Columbia, MO and have a mini-reunion with this terrific student and some of the Mizzou co-teachers.

The Education of a Native Teacher

I was asked to give a presentation on my trip to Korea as part of the University Libraries' Academic Activities Committee. The PowerPoint slides from the brown bag session can be accessed through the SlideShare site link below.

To view explanatory notes and two video files embedded in the presentation, the user must download the file (and it's pretty large).

Education Of A Native Teacher

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: teaching camp)

Damyang dreams

I've returned home from my Korea teaching and travels nearly two months ago, yet I still dream almost every night about people and places from my time in Jeollanamdo. Can you feel homesick for a place where you spent a mere five weeks?

On August 19, I was so very ready to return to my family. But I was not ready to leave Korea. If I were in different place in my life (recent grad, young, single), I would have signed one of the year-long contracts the Jeollanamdo Provincial Office was offering to stay on and teach for the current school year. I think it speaks highly of the program and our employers that there were many of us who wished we could have stayed in Korea longer

So, since Korea and the people I met there are still on my mind, I'm going to continue to add a few posts and pictures to this blog, after the fact.

You won't mind, will you?

These are a few of my favorite things: Korean children

Sure, I have my reasons to be partial, but even my fellow native teachers have commented on the attractiveness of the Korean people. The babies and children are especially cute. Just look at this little beauty in mother-daughter matching outfits. She shyly waved at me while maintaining a pretty serious face.

Ahhhhh.

These are a few of my favorite things: student names

Me and the home room boys

At our elementary and middle school English camps, the Korean students are asked to choose an English nickname to use during classes. Many of the students are reluctant to choose a nickname or are unfamiliar with English given names, so we have tried to prepare lists of possible choices. For my elementary home room class in the Home Life booth, I wrote a list of names associated with the Brady Bunch characters: Carol, Marsha, Jan, Cindy, and Alice for the girls; Mike, Greg, Peter, Bobby, and Sam for the boys. Just a few of my students chose their own names: Angela, Rachael, Fred, and Jay.

The Fashion class teacher was able to get really creative in her class with her name suggestions: Georgio, Hermes, Calvin, Louis (as in Vuitton), Versace, Gucci, Tiffany, Choo, Coco, and Chanel are some of her students. And students have selected some really interesting names on their own. At our camps we have had Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paris, and Bill Gates. Einstein and Picasso (both girls), Debbie (a boy), Mr. Room Nine, Trash, Staff, Hose (pronounced like José), Dog, Orangutan (a girl), The Joker, The Musician, Taz, Berlin, Bombay, and Rio.

I have mixed feelings about requiring Korean students to select Western-style names, but I suppose it is done mostly to make it easier for we native teachers who do not read hangul or would have a more difficult time remembering Korean names. And it's not unusual for adult Koreans to use an English nickname. But I did appreciate the fact that when native teachers hand out certificates to their home room students at the end of camp, we do use their Korean names.

this is how I felt after completing 108 bows

Monday afternoon we returned to our camp location after enjoying a three-day break between the elementary and middle school sessions. Our hosts arranged for us to attend the Mokpo Maritime Culture Celebration, a trip to Blanco Beach on Jindo Island, a performance of traditional music and dance at the Korean National Namdo Center for Performing Arts, and an overnight temple stay.

While at the Daeheung Buddhist Temple, we were given the opportunity to participate in performing 108 bows following prayer. Several of our group completed the bows, which required us to go from standing position with hands in prayer, to kneeling with forehead touching the ground and hands in supplication. ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT TIMES.

Whew. It wasn't easy, but I'm glad I did it. Most of us were sweating and grimacing when it was all done. And now, three days later, I'm still feeling it in my legs when I go up and down stairs. I can't say I found enlightenment, but it was a good workout.

These are a few of my favorite things: Coffee Shake

Coffee Shake
Originally uploaded by katkimchee

There have been so many things that I've enjoyed about my time in Korea so far. One of the best is Lotte Coffee Shake. Our small convenience store at the camp cafeteria has a large freezer filled with frozen treats - mostly ice cream bars. In this treasure trove, I discovered the coffee shake.

Packaged something like juice pouches, but with a capped nozzle instead of those annoying small plastic straws, the coffee shake must be gently massaged to break up the icy sweet goodness contained within. It's something like my favorite treat back home - coffee granitas. There are other varieties: vanilla, strawberry, and Oreo cookie, but my favorite is the coffee version.

Several of my co-teachers are now hooked, but the convenience store's supply has been exhausted. I tried my best to find out whether they will be getting more, and I think the clerk understood my demonstration of sucking a coffee shake and shedding tears over their disappearance. She held up five fingers, which I take to mean that the supply will be replenished in five days.

Hopefully.

Humidity and fan death

I've just got to get this out of the way. If I had to share one negative thing about my time so far in Korea, it's this: humidity. Oh, I complain regularly about the humid summers back in Nebraska, but that state's got nothing on Jeollanamdo, South Korea. The humidity is so thick, you could cut it like a knife going through a block of tofu. It hides the mountains in the mornings and evenings. My face has worn a perpetual sheen since I got off the plane in Incheon. I've given up on wearing makeup. I'm surprised that I haven't lost 20 lbs. already with the amount of sweat I've produced. My clothes always feel damp and every sheet of paper in my dorm room feels limp and soggy.

Okay, now that I've vented, I do have to say that "air con" as Koreans refer to it, is available in our classrooms and teachers lounge. Not in our camp dorm rooms, although each room is equipped with two oscillating fans mounted opposite one another near the ceiling. That's almost preferable to our situation at the Gwangju orientation center, where the dorm room air conditioners automatically turned off every morning at about 5 a.m. and didn't come back on until 8 p.m. This may have something to do with the collective Korean belief about fan death. Apparently it's true that Koreans believe one should never go to sleep with a fan running and windows closed or the sleeper will never wake up. One of our American orientation teachers explained that fan death serves as a cover-up for deaths by suicide or domestic abuse. Remaining family members will not be shamed, since fan death victims are not autopsied. So when your Korean hosts are simply watching out for you when they may sure you don't have air con or fans running at night.

In addition to the humidity hanging in the air, it's monsoon season here in South Korea. While still in Gwangju, we were warned that a typhoon was expected to hit our province, though we were quite a bit inland, so probably no danger. We've experienced a couple of rainy days and today was a whopper. Camp students and teachers were awakened at 5 a.m. with a torrential downpour, thunder and lightning. A good illustration for the Weather section teacher, but the rest of us were tired and grumpy this morning due to sleep deprivation. But at least the temperature outside dropped a few degrees!

Internet access at long last!

The biggest challenge since arriving in Korea has not been the food, or the language, or even the horribly hot and humid weather - it's been the lack of Internet access.

As I mentioned previously, at our training location near Gwangju there was no in-room access, only as computer lab shared by 50+ of we teachers. That made it difficult to spend much time online, to update this blog or my photo page, or to email family and friends. On Tuesday, we spent most of the day in travel mode, first taking a bus to Nuan, near the port city of Mokpo, to meet with the governor of the Jeollanamdo province, and then to travel on to the four English camps. We arrived late in the evening at the Damyang camp and although we were delighted to find that each teacher had been assigned their own room and that there were LAN connections, there was no Internet. After two days, that's changed and I now have online access in my room! Hallelujah!

There is still one small problem: finding time to spend online. Our teaching day goes from 7:40 am (breakfast) through 9:00 pm each day. And that's with no extended breaks. Pretty exhausting for those of us used to 8-hour work days and two days off a week. We'll be teaching at the elementary camp until the final day, August 1.

Photos on Flickr

I'm attempting to upload photos from two trips into the city of Gwangju on Flickr, so check my page for images:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/midwestkimchee/

Your mission, should you accept it

Internet access has been quite sporadic since I've been in Korea, since our training facility doesn't have in-room access and the computer lab contains just 3-4 PCs that are working. I hope this changes once we get to our camps, as we've been told that they have computer labs and possibly in-room LAN connections.

The last two days have been filled with orientation sessions led by mostly Canadian teachers here in the Jellanam-do province. Today, we travel to one of the camps, Damyang, which is just 20 miles north of our current location near Gwangju. This is the same camp to which I've been assigned, so I'll get a sneak preview. We'll be doing demonstrations of our assigned teaching sections to the orientation folks so that they can give us feed back. For the elementary camp, I'll be teaching a section called "Home Life" which includes dialogue and vocabulary on family members, jobs around the home, and rooms of the house. Two of our activities will be creating a family tree and student's design of their dream room. I'll be teaching this same 3-hour section twice a day for six days, each time to 14 students. I suspect I'll be a little shaky the first few sessions, pretty smooth the next couple of days, and deadly dull for the final days. We will be assigned to a Korean co-teacher who speaks English, but it's really our responsibility to run the show.

During the second camp, for middle schoolers (who I understand are as old as 17), I do not have a course assignment, but will be filling the role of activities coordinator, which means I will organize and be the host for daily evening events - quizzes, challenges, mini-Olympics and more. Although I won't be as busy during the school day, I'll have plenty on my hands as I recruit other teachers and explain the rules and schedule for our evening events.

It's a little daunting right now, but we still have a few days before camp begins . . .

Good morning from Gwangju

It's 6:30 a.m. in Gwangju, South Korea and I'm amazed that I'm awake. Yesterday (actually Tuesday AND Wednesday, due to the time difference) were long travel days. The Omalink shuttle picked me up at 5:45 a.m. (I had been awake since 4:30). Had an uneventful flight from Omaha to Chicago, and then joined the group of MU students at O'Hare for our 1:30 p.m. departure to Incheon-Seoul airport. Korean Air rocks - wonderful service and food. Lots of nice touches, like socks, eye masks, toothbrushs and paste in a nifty little neck holder. Hee hee. The Canadian woman sitting in my row was also traveling to teach at an English summer camp as well, but was doing it solo. Good to talk to her, as she's also a mom (of teenagers) and is wrapping up her Master's in education.

After arriving in Incheon at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday 7/16 (I lost a day!) we gathered our baggage (I dumped the Bison jerky I had brought as a gift, rather than suffer the wrath promised by warnings about bringing in meat and other agric. products), we boarded a bus with disco lights and purple curtains, beginning the four hour drive south to Gwangju. It was rainy and humid, but fun to watch the landscape pass by, until we hit Seoul and stop and go traffic. I swore I wouldn't sleep until reaching Gwangju, but the lull of bus zonked me out. Stopped halfway at a sort of bus stop/food court for dinner of udon noodles or bibimbap. Accidently bought peach flavored water ("ear Water" brand) instead of the straight stuff. Two more hours of travel in the dark and we arrived at our training institute.

More later, but I need a shower NOW.

What I'll do on my summer vacation

In early May, I learned that I had been accepted to participate in the teaching program! I'm fortunate that my family and employer have been supportive of my traveling for this month-long opportunity teaching at a language-immersion summer camp in the Jeollanam-do province.

The past two months have been a whirlwind as I've worked to submit all of the necessary paperwork: visa applications, employment contracts, medical forms, and digging up my B.A. diploma to send to the Korean Embassy for review. I visited the University Health Center for a round of immunizations related to my travels. Since I'll be spending a month in the southern province of Jeollanam-do, which is the most rural of the provinces, it was recommended that I receive vaccines for hepatitis A and typhoid (both of which are (transmitted through food or water), and DPT (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus). I skipped the vaccines for Japanese encephalitis (pretty rare), malaria (only a threat near or north of the DMZ), rabies, and hepatitis B (since I don't plan to share any bodily fluids). My university health center and the CDC were both really helpful in this area. I've supported the retail economy by shopping online for light-weight, quick-dry clothing, and other travel sundries. I wish I had more time to learn Korean. I guess I'll cram during my 13+ hour flight.

And in addition to my travel preparations, I've been working full time, completing my 90 hour practicum, and squeezing in as much family time as possible. The clock is ticking, today is my last day at work, and I've packed in a short training session, my final practicum hours, and wrapping up everything on my desk.

one step closer

This afternoon, I'll be interviewing by phone with the MU coordinator of this summer's Korean teaching program. I mailed my application last week to meet the March 31 deadline, so I'm excited to see the process is moving along.

Fortune

happy anniversary: fortune cookie
Originally uploaded by jek in the box.

Saturday night, we had dinner at one of our favorite spots, Yang's Cafe. It's one of the few Asian restaurants in town that serves Korean dishes. After sharing broccoli beef, bulgogi, and kimchee, Evan and I cracked open our fortune cookies. Brian doesn't care for the cookies, or maybe it's the fortunes he's avoiding. Anyway, my fortune read:

Traveling this year will bring your life into greater perspective.

I mailed my application for the Korean summer teaching program to MU on Thursday. And my passport arrived in the mail that same day, just three weeks after sending in my renewal application. I don't want to assume this is a sign, but . . .

Anyeoung-haseyo!

Last week, I learned about an opportunity for MU students to apply for a month-long program teaching English to elementary and middle school students at a summer camp in South Korea. After confirming that applications would be accepted from MU distance education students as well as those on the Columbia campus, I've decided to apply. 24 MU students will be selected to pair up with a Korean English teacher for the summer teaching program, held at a summer camp located in Jeonnam Province (Jeollanam-do).

I've touched base with my school advisor, my work and practicum supervisors, and my family, but still need to get approval from my employer to take time off if I'm selected. My passport renewal application was mailed Saturday. I can't pass up the opportunity to travel to Korea, experience the people and culture of my son's birth country, and gain some useful instruction experience with young people.

Wish me luck!