Video: My First Day at a Korean Elementary School

A video of my first day at Anil Elementary School
(short & sweet- I threw it together very quickly at the last-minute...)


There was no "teaching" on my first day of school and essentially the rest of the week.
My job has been to sit in our English teacher's office room and browse through textbooks. So I volunteered to do a Learning about Introductions presentation for my classes, to escape boredom and to finally see some of my kids. Apparently, on Facebook, some others are experiencing the same sitting-around thing.  It sounds as if many co-teachers aren't prepared to have to work with us or are just as new to teaching English as we are.

I help teach 3rd-6th grade and there are 4 classes per grade, so essentially, I teach 16 classes a week. I have 3 different co-teachers I have to work with and only 2 have experience teaching English. They say flexibility is key in Korea - how their teachers are thrown different responsibilities at the last minute is an example.  I am one of those responsibilities for my main co-teacher and the English teacher without experience was really a music teacher until last year.

The English teacher's office

First Day Introductions

Hello, You're a Celebrity on the School News Channel
My school introduced me via video broadcast. Our school has a broadcast room and when they introduced me via video camera, I had to perform a short bow so that the students could see me on the computer web-cast/projection screen in their classroom. While this may seem spectacular by western standards, for Koreans, its nothing out of the ordinary. The Korean school system seems to be a little more technologically advanced in their own way; and while teachers may not all be tech-saavy, they can all teach via Powerpoint presentations. I guess you could say the Korean classroom has the tools of a typical American business.

The Welcome Lunch
Being a new inductee to the school, me and a handful of other newbie teachers and school staff were treated to a welcome lunch by our Principal and Vice Principal.  During lunch period, we walked over to a nearby restaurant. My co-teacher was um..."uninvited", which embarassed and miffed her a bit- she would have taken it as an honor; but my Principal is a soft-spoken and elderly lady who makes you smile inside and her English isn't bad either.  We spoke on the way over to the restaurant and I sat next to her. Oddly however, it was our Vice Principal who sat at the head of the table and posed a more intimidating seal to crack.  Sandwiched proudly between my Principal and V.P. on the left side of the table, it was the right hand seat of the VP which seemed to be the senior and honored seat (I'm guestimating...). The new 6th grade home room teacher who was seated there mock-declined her seat in the standard "Please, please...I'm not worthy..." Asian way. She looked sweet yet was dressed in a bit of an authoritative, manish way- a suit with a tie- and took command of certain traditional things that I would have not known, like pouring drinks, etc... She was definitely the right right-hand.

Other EFL teachers on my EPIK Daegu groups on Facebook experienced drinking soju, dinner partying and noribanging (aka going to karaoke) with their Principals and co-teachers. Not here. The air was stiff at our lunch table to the point of making me forget how to use chopsticks! There was light conversation, but only in reply to the seniors when they would speak. It was a meek, serious and quiet bunch... still, I was very grateful they weren't into getting plastered and noribanging (those were two rumored things I was actually dreading)!

My 1st day name cheat sheet (all the names which would be bad not to know)

The Challenge of Memorizing Korean names
Unlike the Western culture in which each person is called either by their first or last name; in Korea, each person essentially has 3 names- a family and a two-legged surname (or last name, first-first.. something like that). For instance:

Principal:  Choi, Jung-Hye
Vice Principal:  Jung, Yong-Suk
Main Co-Teacher:  Kim, Eun-Hyung
Co-Teacher #2: Kim, Soo-Mi
Co-Teacher #3:  Lee, Hyun-Jeong

That's a brain-full for the first day. Seeing as I'm new and obviously will have trouble remembering them all, I've been allowed to call a teacher by her first name (at least that's one down) and if a teacher is really nice and excited about my being there, then she might even give me a English name to call her by, if she has one. I've only gotten one English name and it's Angelina (I think you can figure out where that name comes from, so I'm actually going to try my hardest to remember her real name)