Orientation wrap-up: The Beginning of the End

I just finished up a poster making session with a group of other middle school english teachers. This was meant to be a graphical representation of an action plan, a term that was never well enough defined to make it useful requirement. Nevertheless, we devised enough content to fill up a poster, so all should be fine. I'm not so sure that we'll win the prize for best action plan, but I don't really care.

No one really does at this point. Today they bussed us all into Seoul so that we could all do classroom observations. A rather awkward classroom observation since the observers nearly outnumbered the observed, but it was a helpful introduction to the intricacies of co-teaching. Afterwards they took us to the National Museum of Korea, a very large museum which covers the entire history of Korea. This was also our first real sojourn to Seoul.

The problem has been that we hardly feel as though we've been to Korea so far. Aside from the increasingly unappetizing cafeteria kimchee, we've been stuck in a microcosm of western culture isolated as we are at the training center. So today's trip seemed like a sadistic way to tease us about actually getting to Seoul and settling in. Not to mention that very few people seem to be taking this training course very seriously to begin with. On the bus this morning into Seoul there was a vocal minority chatting about how they were still drunk from last night as we were leaving. This attitude, coupled with the fact that the only useful piece of information we've received during the orientation is "it depends on your school," doesn't make for a very enthusiastic group of trainees.

So about the only thing anyone really cares about at this point is getting to Seoul tomorrow and getting their apartment, so that we can begin to settle in and see what this year is really going to be like.

-Richy.