We spent a day at a Korean school where we were treating as honored guests, being served refreshments from the students who put on an impressive assembly for us before we were escorted around the school and then given a chance to teach a lesson to a group of 8th graders. The highlight of the tour was our animated, articulate and quite funny student guides, who had a pretty good idea of how extreme Korean education is compared to what we American teachers were used to. They showed us their beautiful gym and laughed when they said "But we're not allowed to use it!" What little "free" time they have, they explained, must be spent studying or they'd get on their teachers' ca-ca list. The best was when they asked us to guess what time school would be out that day (keeping in mind that they'd started at 8 a.m.). Leslie, my North Carolinian teaching partner, guessed, "6 o'clock?" We guessed from the smiles on their faces that guess wasn't even close so I ventured, "9 o'clock?" Nope. These kids would be out of school at 11 o'clock (yes, p.m.)!!!! Unbelievable. As a matter of fact, after about a 45 minute tour of the school our guides said, "We have to leave you now - we can't spend any more time away from class." Now this was a foreign language magnet school, so you'd think that conversing in English (the students were English majors even though the school also offered Spanish and Chinese) would have been considered a learning experience. But, nope, it was back to the book grind for the kids as we went to teach our lesson.
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| The assembly |
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| Leslie teaching her lesson on her home state - North Carolina |
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| Leslie is from Winston-Salem - the home of Krispy Kreme - so she brought hats for all the kids! |
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| My lesson was postcards depicting scenes from Daytona Beach and the Daytona International Speedway - with fun messages written by my students |
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| I provided the Korean students with Korean postcards, which they eagerly filled out to send to my DeLand students - some sharing Facebook information! |
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| My gift to the students (besides the postcards) was Stetson bandanas! BTW, Brianne tells me Koreans do the peace signs on both sides of their face in order to make their faces appear to be more oval (less round), thereby conforming more to their ideal of 'beauty' |
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| Exterior of the school, which by the way was a private foreign language school. Some of the students were boarders. |
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