Every morning, I walk into school and walk straight here. These are the teachers’ shoe lockers. I take off my shoes and change into my indoor shoes. On top of the lockers there are guest slippers. There are floral slippers for women and plain black ones for the men.
Friday afternoon I had my after school class. These kids are the highlight of my work week. There are 5 students in total, but one student had to miss class due to a Girl Scouts sleepover.
The weather forecast predicted sunny and clear skies all last week. That’s why it was a giant surprise when I heard a loud clap of thunder. I looked out the window and then it started pouring down rai. The rain only lasted about 10 minutes, but it was a huge surprise. The windows in my office were open and I could hear children squeezing as they tried to scurry out of the rain.
This week I came to school to find a large flat screen TV had been installed in the front entranceway at school.
Now there’s a live stream of Dokdo Island to greet the students every day.
Dokdo is an island that Korea and Japan have a famous feud over.
May 15th is Teacher’s Day in Korea and it’s also my birthday. Double yay!
My day was truly amazing. The students were really sweet. I got lots of letters from students and at lunch time, this group of girls surprised me in my office with a poster and they sang happy birthday to me. My heart was so full all day.
After school, Dave picked me up from school. We had dinner near the beach. Dinner was fantastic. I am one lucky girl.
My co-teacher was out sick today so I had to teach 4th grade all alone. This was my first time in the 14 months I’ve been here that I’ve had to teach alone for a full day. It actually went really well, considering 4th grade has the most ADHD students of any grade and they are the worst behaved.
After my last class, one of the 4th grade girls walked up to me with this picture she had drawn of me.
For the first 4 weeks of my after school class with my advanced 6th graders I’ve been teaching games. On the 5th week, their project was to bring a game to class and explain how to play in English. One boy brought a game called Blue Marble Game. It’s almost exactly like Monopoly. This is a picture of him setting up.
Other games were dice games, chess and a weird version of rock, paper, scissors where the winner gets to hit the loser over the head with a big plastic toy hammer.
I got a nice surprise this afternoon. Two of my former students came to visit me. I asked them about middle school and they really seemed to like it. Also, I asked the girl on the left about her pen pal in America (a project I did last year). She said now they are friends on Facebook (she made the account just for him). He doesn’t have a picture, but she thinks his brother is very handsome.
Every Friday afternoon I have teach an after school class to 5 students in 6th grade. They are really awesome kids and it is one of my favorite parts of the week.
Last week we were playing a game and I said the youngest person goes first. To teach them what youngest meant, I had to ask them all what their birthdays were. After I said mine, one of the boys decided to take note on his name tag. I thought it was really sweet.
Every morning I stand at the front of the school and greet the students. They are supposed to stop and read the dialogue on my sign. When they finish, they put a sticker under their grade level.
These two sisters walk to school hand in hand each day. In this picture, the older sister (5th grade) is helping her 1st grade sister with the dialogue.
Life Outside of Texas 