School begins on March 1st and the first semester ends in July. There is a summer vacation from sometime in July until sometime in August. (I know that "sometime" is pretty vague, but this is almost a direct quote from my Co-Teacher so I'm sticking with it). The second semester begins in late August, maybe the final week, and runs strong until the end* of December. There are two months of winter break; January and February.
*It's worth pointing out that while students take their finals during the first week of December, we still teach until the end of the month. It's a little strange to teach from the textbooks after the kids have completed their finals, but that's just the way it goes.
Two months break in the summer and two in the winter. Seems like a pretty sweet deal, right? And it is a sweet deal if you happen to be a student or a non-contract teacher, and you guessed it, I am not a student and I am a contract* teacher.
* There are plenty of Korean teachers who are also contract teachers, and they are also required to desk warm during vacations.
This means that I'll be showing up for school everyday during the winter break. This is called "desk warming" and if you find yourself sitting in an expat bar around late-December or late-June, you'll find that the air is ripe with conversations about how much "this just sucks, man. What am I going to do for 2 months?"
Don't fret my fellow and/or prospective Guest English Teachers, most of us will have 1 or 2 weeks of camp to keep us occupied. Then the students will come back to school for a week (?) in February...in order to....do...things...
It's also worth pointing out that we are allotted 10 days of paid vacation in the winter. Couple those days with a few weekends and it bumps up to 16. Not such a bad deal at all.
Camp is basically just an excuse to have some fun while teaching the students. Kids sign up and come and go as they please, (or at least they did at my camp and my co-teachers didn't seem to mind). My camp began after the New Year and lasted for 5 days. Here are some of the highlights:
Superheroes: When I was young, I loved superheroes. Luckily, movies like Iron Man, Spider Man, and Batman are very popular here in Korea, so the kids also share my sentiments. They got to create their own heroes, give them powers, and then design their costumes. After that, we played a game where each team had to guess which hero I like more. For some reason they just absolutely love trying to guess things about me. In one class, the boys and the girls were divided into two teams. The boys had 15 points and the girls had 1, so I decided to make the final question worth 14 points. The girls finally guessed the correct answer and I almost had a riot on my hands.
Monsters: They love horror movies here so I introduced them to some classic American horror films like Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Wolfman. Then the kids played a game in which they rolled some dice and created a monster of their own. Each side of the die corresponded with different monster parts. They simply drew the part based on the numbers they were rolling. It was good fun. After that, we made our own monster masks. Most of the kids wanted to make zombie masks so I used this as an opportunity to gross out my co-teachers by leaving still images from zombie movies up on the screen while the kids tried to replicate the gruesome faces. Here's a few of my favorites:
Canape(?): According to one of my co-teachers, Canape is some kind of French pastry(?) or treat(?). I wasn't sure, so I looked up a definition using a highly reliable source, (not Wikipedia) and I came to learn that canape is indeed a French word meaning "couch". Upon further investigation, I can confirm that canape is basically a small, decorative, handheld food that is eaten in one bite, also know as an appetizer. Anyway, I had no idea what to prepare for this but luckily my co-teachers already had a plan and a "recipe". First, I'll just list the ingredients. Pay close attention and try to visualize a "small, usually decorative, handheld food".
1 piece of toasted white bread cut into 4 squares
1 Ritz cracker
1 smear of cream cheese
1 piece of yellow American cheese, unwrapped and divided into 4 squares
1 slice of tangerine
1 cherry tomato, halved
a few raisins
Does this sound all fancy and French-like to you? Well, allow me to continue.
First, smear the cream cheese on the toasted bread.
Second, place the Ritz cracker on top of the cream cheese.
Third, place the American cheese on top of the cracker,
Fourth, place the tomato and tangerine slices on top of the cheese.
Fifth, garnish with raisins.
So basically we just made a weird, open-faced, cheese sandwich that looked like this:
In case you are wondering, I didn't try one. Something about it just didn't really pique my interest. The kids seemed to enjoy it though and after about 5 minutes, it turned into "who can stuff the largest pile into their mouth", documented here:
Pizza Party: No camp would be complete without one. I don't really need to explain this so I won't.
 |
| Pizza Famine |
Of course the pizza arrived about 15 minutes early leaving this little guy to pass out because he needed pizza so badly. I know that pain...
Camp was a little difficult at times, most notably during the first 2 days. It's not easy to keep the attention of 50 fifth grade students for 3 consecutive hours. My advice is to not sweat the first 4.5 days of camp because if you're smart, you'll just use the final 40 minutes to wipe the slate clean with pizza. It's science.
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