Intensives and eclipse

(view of the eclipse from India, stolen from the BBC)

Not only do Korean children have incredibly short summer vacations (about a month), but they still have to go to academy (i.e. what I teach). Some children have to take even more classes at academy to ensure that they have no time to just be children. Our school calls this month of extra classes 'intensives'. This happens every year, but as with the start of the new school year, it caught my bosses completely off guard. We got our schedules on the Thursday morning before the classes started, but we weren't told what the hell we were doing in those classes until after the last class of the day on Friday. And by 'told', I mean that ambiguous minimal instructions were left taped to the white board in the teacher's room. We've been scrambling and screwing up all week, but two of the people here only have a month left, one only has this week, and Will and I have been infected by the contagious senioritis. In addition to all my normal classes, teach reading and writing classes, and a class on Harry Potter, in which they will theoretically read a book a week for four weeks.

On the 22nd we took a break from the intensive classes and escorted the children to the roof to watch the most impressive solar eclipse for decades and the longest lasting one for the next century. I didn't know about it until I got to work (thanks Will!) so I didn't have my camera, but it looked like a waning moon only of course it was much brighter. The children were given sheets of colored plastic, which when folded over a few times provided a little protection for their eyes, so hopefully none of us damaged our vision too badly.



Update: photos taken and collected by Will:


This is what we saw with our colored sheets of plastic:This is the view from the space station: