Stephanie goes to Korea
Monday, May 26th, 2008This has been an interesting week. Last week we sent Michael home. He was ready to go. As soon as he got home he was headed for a week long field trip to 제주도. We Skyped with his mother before he left. She missed him a lot but it looks like she had to wait another week before she got to see him.
We, on the otherhand, just sent our oldest daughter to Korea. She will be there for the next seven weeks. She is doing a “service project” for school credit here where she will be volunteer teaching at an elemetary school, helping out with English instruction. Her first day will be tomorrow.
She is feeling a bit overwhelmed with the lack of English interaction already. Not understanding anything that is said around you can be headache inducing, especially combined with jet-lag. Typical for her though, she has commented at how fashionable everyone is, especially their shoes!
Hopefully, I will be able to post updates about her stay in Korea on a weekly basis. I am sure that her Korean will improve. It will have to. I should have a full update next week!
Posted by steved in Travels in Korea, Steve's House |
May 27th, 2008 at 1:44 am
What a brave soul she is…when I go to France, it seems like the jetlag alone stops me from understanding most of a language that I otherwise speak fluently. Hopefully soon her head will stop spinning and she’ll start catching more and more words. What a great experience for her.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
wow, that is extremely brave… will she be meeting with some family?
May 27th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
She is staying with her aunt right now (my wife’s sister) but she will be staying with a friend who lives closer to the school starting next week and then back at her aunt’s on the weekends. She’ll be able to walk to the school. She just tried to chat with me (but I missed it). She said the teacher just gave her the class to teach by herself. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. She also said that there are way too many Canadians at the school (No offense meant, DanielK
).
May 27th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
None taken!
It’s the same at my 학원 too, actually. It seemed like every new foreign teacher we were getting was from Canada. We started to wonder: if all the Canadians are in Korea, then who’s in Canada? The answer, of course, is the Koreans. 
I feel bad for your daughter, since the teacher didn’t seem to realize how seriously tired and disoriented jet lag can make one feel. And to suddenly be thrust in front of a group of children… :S
May 28th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
How old is your daughter? Is she getting college credit?
May 29th, 2008 at 12:31 am
한국 나이로 she is 17. She is finishing up her junior year of high school. She attends a ‘classical’ college prep school located on a college campus. Everyone takes the same classes, no electives. The school year follows the semester system of the college so that leaves a few extra weeks at the end of the semester where the students can take elective courses. The school, at our request, made a custom elective for her. There are classes in the curriculum that are taken directly through the college, like foreign languages, where she gets college credit but this isn’t one of them.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:32 am
How did she sign up for it? If I could still sign up for something like that over summer or one of my breaks next year, that would be amazing.
May 31st, 2008 at 1:52 am
Courtny,
because some of their students speak better English than they do. They are put in an awkward position of trying to teach students that feel like they know more than the teacher just because they can speak better. Many students have private tutors or have had homestay experience in the United States or the Philippines ans as a result, feel superior to their teachers. Regardless, the teachers don’t want to make that inequality worse. We didn’t want to put our daughter in the middle of that situation either but one day the principle called to ask about her and we told him that the teachers said they couldn’t use her. He basically said, “nonsense…” and made it happen.
We know the principal of the school. It actually wasn’t that easy to set up. Initially we worked with the teachers but they were very resistant to having a native speaker in their classrooms. We thought that it wasn’t going to work out. The teachers are a bit intimidated (maybe not the right word̷
So far she has only taught for two days but that is a subject for another blog post…
As for the high school that she attends here, it is a public charter school.
May 31st, 2008 at 2:25 am
Steve,
That’s great that she gets to flexibility to do volunteer work like this and get high school credit for it.