Teaching at Poly and a Flood

In the "I forgot to post this in the correct temporal order" file, here's some pictures from work.

In Korea, every major city has a river that runs through it, and those rivers flood fairly regularly. The areas around the rivers are built into parks and bike paths, which aren't as easily damaged by water and which can be more easily reconstructed. After a rainy week, it was fun to look out the window of the classrooms and watch the water rise. The pool across the river was particularly interesting, since we could see the brown torrent spill over into the pool's clear water and see the swirling progress of the sediment filled water.

I don't talk about the teaching enough on this blog because to me it was the backdrop to the awesome adventures I'd have on weekends and breaks. The work day was grueling, but rewarding. I taught ten or eleven classes every day, for a total of ten and half hours of work each weekday at minimum, plus planning for classes and doing grading, so often more like twelve hours. I was pretty fairly compensated for that work at Poly, and the excellent curriculum and brilliant students made the job meaningful. I remember being asked why I worked so hard, coming in early and staying late, and responding that doing the minimum amount of effort at that job required ten and half hours of work, and if I was only doing the minimum that meant I wasn't valuing it, so I was wasting ten and a half hours a day and would go home feeling drained, or at best relieved. On the other hand, if I decided that what I was doing was important and put in the extra effort then I was doing something valuable for twelve hours a day and went home feeling satisfied. I really miss teaching at that level, especially to my kindergarteners where I was teaching concepts outside of English, such as science, and to my most advanced students who I taught textual analysis as well as debate classes where they considered the pros and cons of issues as complex as whether or not South Korea should continue food aid to North Korea. 

Okay, enough introspection. Here are some kindergarten students being cute at birthday parties and art class: