technical difficulties

Fabulous. I managed to delete my "About me" box and just seem to be messing things up more screwing around with the Korean buttons to put it back ... I may just run anonymously a couple months until I'm back on an English-language network here ...

Week 1 of teaching is going pretty smoothly, which really isn't saying much considering the situation. I'm co-teaching with a new master's grad in linguistics, and there are two teachers' aides AND a Korean translator in the classroom - yes, five adults for 12 students. The Village will be more like one or two adults for 15 students, but this summer camp is a way for the college to use all of us milling about, waiting for the Village to open.

Still, it's something of an accomplishment to have created lesson plans, adapted things on the spur of the moment and kept a dozen youngsters fairly engaged for three hours when you've never done that before. I now feel at least a little more legitimate using that title of "teacher" that I've co-opted for a few weeks now.

One of the boys - "Harry" (Sidenote: it's amazing what a bestselling series can do for a name's popularity. Apparently there are downright scuffles to get dibs on that moniker in each class - there's always one - and the kids all chant "Haahh-reee Poh-teh!" anytime the little guy gets a turn at the board or a game) ... anyway, our Harry brought us new teachers candy this morning, which may be quite perfunctory but still totally made my day.

I'm in a class of kids who are theoretically 10 to 13, but the way Koreans count age makes things a little hinky. As I understand it, Korean children are born being 1 year old, and they all have their "birthdays" Jan. 1, so a child born Dec. 28 could be "two" just four days later. Hence we've got tiny little "June," with the quiet stare and barely audible whisper, and tall, gangly "Ann," with all the markings of teen awkwardness and angst. And I thought I had it tough being the youngest in my class, desperately waiting for my driver's license a mere few months after my classmates ...

On a final note of the day, check out the animated "tour" of the Village by clicking here. Of course it still looks pretty much nothing like that, but the bones are there, and it'll get fleshed out eventually.

Later, gators.