Medical Exams and Classroom Management

As I said in my last post, I really haven't been able to explore much. Sunday was the last free day I had, and I spent most of that day prepping for work, trying not to get lost, and experimenting with food. Since then, I've been training at Chungdahm. The goal, they say, is to be able to survive my first day. At first, I was off-put by that. After all, I want to be the coolest, best, most brilliant teacher ever! Setting my sights on the first day seemed so limiting. But now I see the wisdom of that. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let me tell you about my Monday.

Jet lag is a terrible thing. Korea is thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast, meaning that my nights and days are completely reversed. In terms of functionality, I'm pretty functional. That's what coffee is for. No, the real problem is that I wake up at 5 am every morning, and spend the next 1.5 hours trying desperately to go back to sleep. So far no luck. Anyway, Monday rolled around and I arose, exciting and slightly nervous for my first day of work. Rather than let a bunch of stupid, loud, incredibly lost Americans loose on the Seoul metro system, Chungdahm sent a bus to pick us up from the hotel. We spent the morning hearing from our trainers and stumbling our way through a basic understanding of company philosophy.

The day would have been super-special-great if not for a little thing called a medical exam. Apparently, Korea takes TB, AIDS, and drug use seriously. Huh. Who'd have thought, right? So after class, they dumped us at a doctor's office, where we were subjected to all sorts of fun tests. We also had to wear little uniforms, which I suppose made things much easier for the doctors, but also made a number of people uncomfortable, due to lack of underwear. We had also been required to fast since the night before. By the time I was finished giving blood, giving a urine sample, having hearing, eyesight, and blood pressure checked, taking a chest x-ray, having my proportions measured, having my teeth checked, getting an EKG done, and confirming that no, I do not in fact have a heroine addiction...I was very, very, very hungry. My achievements for the rest of the day involved eating a lot of food and passing out at 8:30 because I was too tired to even watch Avatar.

Tuesday was training. And prepping for today, Wednesday.

Today, we had to mock teach for the first time. For me, this was, quite literally, my first time teaching. And...it was terrible. Our trainers place us up in front of the class and then instruct one of our fellow classmates to act out a disruptive behavior, the idea being that the poor, bewildered teacher must somehow navigate the lesson and deal with a smart-ass Korean middle schooler at the same time. I tried, I really did! But by the end of my poor attempt at a lesson, the entire class was talking about pepperoni pizza and not about how to pick out a topic sentence. *sigh* My afternoon lesson went a lot better, though. The lesson had to do with context clues, and I was able to illustrate a pretty good example involving Queen Elizabeth II and Obama.

So here I am, procrastinating for tomorrow by writing a blog post. Tomorrow, I have to teach another lesson. Something about technology and the media. And hopefully not about pepperoni pizza. Wish me luck!

Tarico