Mid March

We had a fairly relaxed weekend this time.  We were invited to dinner with one of my former kindergarten students' family who had been saddened by the fact I had left the school and was no longer his teacher.  Fortunately his parents understand the situation that caused us to leave unexpectedly.  However, since Tommy had become so attached to me (and vice versa!) they want to stay in touch with us and meet up again, though I will say he completely ignored me all night!  I think this was the first time I've had parents of a student thank me so profusely for teaching their child.  After the hard work we've put in to sticking up for ourselves over the last month and striving to give all we had into our teaching this last year, it was definitely a very rewarding evening.  Their very generous comments and actions will stay with me for a very long time I'm sure.

Last Thursday we went to the immigration office and officially completed all of the legal requirements involved in transferring our work visas from one work place to another.  Living and working legally in a country can be an exhausting process with much paperwork!!  But we're glad it's finished for the last time.

This week I will be going to a required training for all new teachers that work in the GEPIK program.  The public school that I work at now is part of the Gyeonggi English Program in Korea so I will go with all the other new foreign teachers to the training for three days this week, where I will hopefully learn more about how the program works and some teaching tips as well.  It's still strange being the only foreigner in the school.  I was thinking today about when I had to write work samples during my student teaching time, a large part of the introduction had to be about the diversity within a classroom (a hot topic in American public schools since there is so much diversity in all schools).  I don't know for sure, but I think I found maybe two or three kids that look like they might not be full Korean out of the 300 I teach.  We've known for a year about the lack of diversity Korea seems to have as a whole, but I think I'm discovering it even more by working in a school that sees over a thousand students and employees come and go everyday, only one of them being "different."  It's interesting and a different concept to think about for sure but overall I'm still definitely loving this job!