A Typical Week: Monday

 Hi everyone!  I apologize for the long gap between posts, but get used to it, I'm busy!  This is going to be a short one; I'll just outline a typical week in the life of Thomas, so you get an idea of why I'm not blogging all the time.  Oh, and so you know what I'm doing everyday!

Let's start with Monday, and go from there.  In fact, I'll post each day as it happens this week, and you can read up on the day of the week that I'll be finishing as you begin it!

Monday

It's funny how much what each person in this picture is
doing describes who they are.
1급B반!

9:00am - 1:00pm Korean Language Class

I will post a whole post about this, I promise.  For understanding the schedule, though, you should know we have three different teachers that rotate, each teaching  us for two hours at a time.  The three subjects are Listening & Speaking, Writing & Grammar, and Reading & Pronunciation.  Typically we'll have homework from each of these two out of three times that we have them, plus general studying that should happen (but often doesn't have time to).  Today it's Listening & Speaking followed by Writing & Grammar.

1:00pm - 2:30pm Lunch/Plan for Children's Center

2:45pm - 3:30pm Ride the Bus to Work

The bus system here in Daejeon is very nice, you can get pretty much anywhere in the city for about $1.10 (1,100원).  The key is that you pay when you get on the bus, usually by scanning your Tmoney card, but if you need to transfer buses or even to the subway, you can scan your card again on the way out and you won't get charged again for the next bus.

3:40pm - 4:50pm English class with Elementary Students at 새움 Children's Center

This is my job, it will also get its own post later.  These kids are hilarious and fun to play with, but teaching them English is not always as easy as I'd like.  It turns out that as a physics major, I don't really know how to teach English as a second language to Korean 2nd graders, who knew?  But I'm figuring it out, and I think I will improve at teaching it and making it interesting, and they will improve at learning it!

5:00pm - 5:30pm Dinner

An odd combo I don't think you'd find anywhere else...

I'm really appreciating the food at my children's center!  It's been delicious every time so far.  Except for the occasional small scoop of anchovies, I'm happy to have a free meal twice a week.  They even have french fries from time to time!

5:32pm - 5:50pm Music Practice/Lessons

As I may have mentioned before, Korean children are all encouraged to play an instrument.  During this time, we all head up stairs, grab the instrument of choice, and practice it.  This sometimes means practicing songs, but just as often is just fiddling around time.  I probably should take this time to practice piano (does Paul read this blog?), but lately I've been grabbing a guitar and learning from the other kids where to put my fingers for the chords.

5:55pm - 7:10pm Teach/Entertain the Middle School Students

This is the time I should be teaching the middle school students their English sentence patterns, and I try.  But, as you can see,  I have to do it for more than an hour.  Those of you who teach or have taught middle school students know how difficult this is.  Now imagine that they don't really want to learn what you're teaching (not too difficult to picture), and you can only understand little bits of anything they say in their native tongue.  So we end up playing a lot of games and having fun together, I'll figure them out eventually!

8:00pm - 12:00am Rest/Study/Do homework/Plan for tomorrow/Process the day

This time may look like four whole hours, but it sure feels like about thirty minutes.  And that 12am finish time is not really very common…

Stay tuned for Tuesday's fun tomorrow!