The First Day of School! (Sort of)

Yesterday (February 14) the first day children came to school to learn, sort of. Because school is big business in Korea and this is the school's first year they are holding two weeks of "exhibition school" to give children a chance to come and see what it is like. The aim is that they have lots of fun and they tell all of their friends, then when school starts for real(March 2) their friends will come too. This is nice for me to ease in to leading the kids because my boss has stressed that we should make having fun priority and learning secondary.

This is my white board (students use the name of the teacher and then the word teacher so students call me Douglas Teacher):

As it turned out half of my class was sick so I was left with just one who's name was Alex. It was a good day as it seemed like he enjoyed the things that I had prepared. The other student, a girl, will be coming on Wednesday. I am not sure about this but I am assuming that I will have more student come March, I will keep you posted.

For lunch the teacher for 5 year olds, In Ju, made lasagna and brought it for lunch. It was incredibly delicious and then she gave me two pieces to take home, so good. It was also Valentine's Day which is celebrated here in Korea by the woman giving the man chocolates. Sangmoon had joked that we should get girlfriends(plural, I assume) so that we could get chocolates, but being pretty busy I hadn't gotten around to it yet. Thankfully In Ju, the 5 year old class teacher who is married, is super nice and got both of us chocolate.

Also it snowed again here overnight which made for a nice surprise when I opened up my balcony to decide what I would wear today.

Tuesday, classes were good, led a cooking class and the kids learned how to put m&m's on cookie dough and got watch me make macaroni and cheese. It was interesting to see their reaction to the mac and cheese, most of them didn't like it and so they fed it to me. Also as of today I am officially an alien. I got my Certificate of Alien Registration, which means that I can now open a bank account and get a cell phone.