First days of teaching

I have successfully completed three days of teaching and I'm still alive. Let's start from the beginning:
The first day was crazy hectic! My school has three age levels: 5, 6, and 7 year olds. But that is their Korean age. Most of the 5 year olds are really 4, most 6 are really 5 and so on. For the 5 year-olds this is their first time away from their moms and their first time being forced to speak only English. So the first day can be a bit terrifying!! To start the day we brought all the kids to the gym together for a "welcome to our school" sort of thing. The younger age kids stayed down there for a while but I am teaching 7 year olds, who are the "upperclassmen" of the school so I got to take my kids back to class. (I teach two classes but one class is considered my "homeroom" class and I typically start my day with them. They are my Leeds class (we name our classrooms after cities in England.) My other class is Bristol and I only start my day with them on Fridays.)
I got to introduce myself to Leeds and they introduced themselves to me and we got our day underway. The kids have 7 main lessons a day and then PE, ballet, art, math, music, and library are scattered throughout the week. Each lesson is between 30-40 min. At the end of the lesson I either stay with the same class, switch classrooms with my partner teacher or take the kids to art, music, etc. All the foreign teachers also have a Korean partner teacher. They teach the class we are not in but in the end the foreign teachers are teaching more classes. It is draining. On the first day we did a lot of get to know you things, went over the rules, how to get a sticker for their sticker boards (very important at Helen Doron) and talked about the coming year. It was an okay day. I felt very unprepared and like I didn't know what I was doing! I felt like the kids knew more than I did and that they were teaching me.

We teach the same lesson to both classes, or at least that's the dream! My two classes couldn't be on two more different academic levels! I was so surprised after that first day!! My Leeds class is a group of baby geniuses! They are so smart, so well behaved and just angels! My Bristol class is another story. After day 1 I realized I will have to prepare two completely different lesson plans for the two classes.

Knowing what I now learned from day 1, day 2 was much better. I was so much more prepared for each class with different lessons planned to match their levels. My partner teacher was also a huge help! She has helped me with finding ways to tweak the lesson plans to accommodate to both classes. It was very frustrating knowing I had to change everything! See, at Helen Doron we have to post our lesson plans, homework assignments, spelling test and whatever else online for the parents and we had to do this last week. So having not been in the classroom and not having met my students or having the chance to evaluate their levels I created the best lesson plan I could. Now, there is NO way I will be able to follow what I posted! But my partner teacher is able to tell the parents this so it will be okay but it is still very frustrating!

Day three was good and bad. The teaching aspect was good, I am really getting the feeling of my classes and now I'm able to tweak things to their different levels and I really feel like I am challenging Leeds and Bristol but to their own levels.
It was bad because we had to get our medical check ups today in order to get health insurance. The check ups weren't the bad things, I couldn't care less about that but it was the fact that they told us when we got to work at 8:30 that we couldn't eat the whole day!! Now for all of you who know me well, you know I can't go 2 hours without eating!! I was so upset because he reason why we couldn't eat was never explained to us and we were told that morning that we couldn't eat! So ridiculous!! So at lunch time, I was just going to say screw it and eat because all the other foreign teachers who had already gone through the medical test ate the day of their check ups and it was fine. But I got in the lunch line and one of the crazy Korean people told me I couldn't. I was almost in tears! Seems like a small battle to fight but I was so pissed!! In the end, the med check up went fine and there was NO reason I couldn't have eaten lunch! Still a bit bitter about that! The only good thing was that we got to go home right after the med check up so we got home about a hour early than normal, but that's besides the point!

I really am enjoying teaching. It is so draining and the pay is not spectacular but it is worth it. With one week almost in the books, I am so glad I decided to come to South Korea. Although they do things much differently here, it will and has been a great experience.