Week 2 of Classes

Well I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything here, but I've been having fun with the exception of getting rained on all day sat. It's hard to complain too much when we've had 3\5 days clear during what I've been told is monsoon season.

Week 1 went well, and I was able to see a lot of great "Project English" projects made. I even have a few repeats for each class. One of the ladies is a Journalism major and wanted to continue practice writing English in a more formal way (mostly conversational English that is taught, even in the writing). Two students who are taking the Children's Stories portion again seemed to really enjoy creating them last week.

One really big thing I think I helped with last week was getting some of the students to use past tense. It seems to be one of the really hard things for them to know when to use. They know the vocabulary without a problem but if you dont point out when to use it then it's likely not going to be used. I dont think that Korea has a tense for future in their language, it's included along with present tense, but they definately have a past tense.

Without further ado I have some of the work from last weeks Children's Stories class. I dont think anything was perfect but that would likely be hard even for us english speakers; it's still very understandable and often really creative! Better than anything I could create!







These are pictures of the Childrens stories they created, once I figure out an easy way to post up a file on here I might post one or two of the Newpaper articles that were written last week as well. The full class picture is actually of my new Children's Stories class as well, not last weeks...

Scenic views on top of the hill

Daegu Catholic University is located on top of a hill almost as a separate entity from the town below. My dormitories are at a particularly high spot with some great views being only a 30 second walk away.














Most of these pictures are from the edges of hills to the left and right of the dormitories, while one is looking right outside and the tall picture of the building is the one I stay in.

Fist day of classes\teaching

Well the english program has started and I just had my first class. It was fun getting to know the people and trying to get on the same page with all of the Korean students.
I teach three hours a day in a classroom of my own. Kelly and Mitch, two other MSU students that I came here with get to do the same. We were told that we needed to create two different themes and lesson plans for two project english classes we would be teaching.

These project english classes are designed to be a fun or at least interesting project based english classes. The purpose of this program is to get these college students ready for the TOIC english exams that they want to score high on so they can find a better job, or at least get paid more. The other classes they take focus on note taking, recitation, and things that are likely not as much fun as project english. I guess that makes the three MSU students the good guys...haha

Every week we should get a new group of students that will have rotated from an old project english class. My two topics are a "newspaper english" project and a Children's Stories class. At night we also teach a tutorial class that is supposed to be used for fun english games, conversations,currrent events in english, or whatever else we can think of...

It will all be ok...

Hopefully the picture explains itself! :)

In Korea

The first picture is outside of dormitory I'm staying in at the Catholic University of Taegu, the second is of the monstrous airplane we flew to Korea in from Chicago, and the 3rd is a restaurant in Seoul as we rode by on a bus, it's the only picture I have right now that actually shows the buildings\style you see a lot of...

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I decided to make a blog so that anyone who was interested in my trip, aka family\friends could see what I was up too and hopefully enjoy a bit of Korea as well.

I'm actually taking this trip with two other students from Mankato State University, and are officially titled as volunteer teaching assistants, although it looks like we will be having our own classes now.
It was a long trip getting here, about 19 hours to Korea (the long flight was 14hrs, with lots of waiting between flights) and then another 5 hours to Taegu via bus and train. 19+5=24 very long hours and 3 very tired people. Since we have arrived at the school everything has been pretty comfortable though; we even have furnished rooms in a special guest wing of one of the dormitories.

Hopefully the trip will be a lot of fun. The 14 hour time difference hasn't even that rough after a good nights sleep. It's weird to see that it is 11 o'clock on Friday night back at home and Saturday 1pm here though.

Hope everyone back home is having fun and I'll try to update the blog and throw on more pictures as I get time\motivation\and something to say.