Start of Teaching Again

Monday was the beginning of the new school year for my kids. The Korean school year is almost the reverse of that in most Western countries. The school year begins in March, and the first semester runs until mid-July.  At this point, they have a month of summer vacation. The second semester begins in mid-August and runs until the end of December. They have winter break for all of January. Then, the students come back for a week at the beginning of February, which is technically graduation week for the grade 3's, but there's still classes. Then, they have what I've been told is called "Spring vacation" for the rest of February and a new school year begins in March. It's kind of crazy, and I don't really understand the weird teaching week in February, but whatever. We just play games with the kids and keep them busy for a little bit.

I will also never understand the fact that the Korean school systems don't have everyone's schedules worked out by the first day of school. It seems like that is something you'd work on during vacation, but the problem is that the person in charge of scheduling is typically a teacher in the department they schedule for. Since there is so much teacher turn around because Korean teachers are only allowed to work in the same school for 4 years, the teacher who is supposed to be the scheduler may not even have been hired yet. It's truly bizarre. We have new books for this year for the grade 2's as well, so I couldn't so any lesson planning over vacation because I didn't even have the new book for well into February, and even then it was just a library copy until I finally got my own copy this week. I still don't have the teacher's book to help me lesson plan for it. Oh the woes of working in a radically different school system. Anyway, given all these circumstances, and despite the fact that school started Monday, I haven't been teaching. I'm set to teach tomorrow with my new schedule. I am still teaching grade 2 and 3. With the new grade 2 book, there aren't culture topics in every chapter, so I'm going to have to make up a few more of those topics. It shouldn't be too difficult to do that though. I'm excited to get back to teaching though. I'm the teacher they know now, with Niall gone, and it's kind of nice. They already have taken more of an interest in me, talking to me as I leave school and stuff. It's cute. Hopefully, tomorrow goes well :)