Campus Life

I'm getting a little behind in my posts.  I had a nice urban exploration last Saturday night in the Gimpo area I haven't written about yet and last night I returned by foot to the commercial section of my local area (called Cheongna, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago on my walk with Eric but this time I thought to take more pictures) for sightseeing, dinner, and shopping, and tonight (Saturday) I plan to take another local walk to a new area but before I get to those I'm going to give you (by popular demand) some description of life on campus.

There's only one way to enter the school campus, and that's by going from the road past the security station (aka guard shack) near the recycling area.  At that point the main entrance to the school is on your right and the faculty residence (used to be called "guest house" and they're still trying to get people to switch over to the new nomenclature) is straight in front of you across a parking lot.  If you walk sort of diagonally across the parking lot you come to a sidewalk between the school and the faculty residence and keep going back (E) away from the road you come here to the entrance to the FR.  The shorter building on the right is attached to the FR and houses the swimming pool.  The lounge and fitness area are on the main floor behind the windows you see and on the back side are some offices for maintenance people.  My room is on the second floor on the right side as you face the building putting it just about below those open windows you can see on the third floor.

This is the lounge area of the faculty residence, which is on your left as you go through the front door.  We had a nice potluck organized by Eric here one evening before school started, which seems like years ago already.

This is the fitness area and is also on the main floor of my building.  Behind it is the swimming pool and the lounge above is behind me as I take this photo.

Going up the stairs and coming into the hall on my floor I get this view.  According to Eric we're not supposed to dry our clothes in the common areas but people do anyway.  But so far I'm trying to avoid that.  People generally leave their shoes outside their doors and I do the same with shoes that are easy to slip on and off (sandals, and a couple pairs that Reid gave me have come in very handy for that reason) but not with ones I have to sit down to tie the laces of (work shoes and my walking pair of tennis shoes).  I have my slippers which Mom gave me last Xmas and sometimes I wear those in my room and sometimes I just go barefoot.  Pretty fascinating stuff!  My door is the second one on the right in this picture, just past the line of drying racks.

I did a couple loads of laundry last weekend.  I did the sheets early Saturday morning and left them to dry all day and they were ready by the time I got back from my Gimpo trip later that evening.  When I bought my drying racks believe it or not I actually planned for that because I had a choice of getting one larger rack for about $30 or two smaller racks for about $17 each and I thought that when it came time to wash my bedding it would be better to have two smaller ones so I could dry the sheet on one and the duvet cover on the other!  Wow, the scintillating tidbits keep coming!  This picture is from last Sunday when I did a load of clothes.  Some were ready to fold by that evening but I left some of the t-shirts and heavier pieces overnight to make sure they were really dry because I've heard if you put them away slightly damp they can start to develop a musty odor (to put it nicely).

This is from the roof of the building, which I didn't realize we could access until Eric mentioned it and we went up there to check out the view.  Again we are looking E away from the street.  That's the boys' dorm in front of us, with an identical one for girls just to the right.  You can see the golf course we abut past that and downtown Seoul is on the far side of the hills in the distance.  The freshly-bulldozed field on the left was full of some kind of tall marsh grass when I arrived just a few weeks ago and a bunch of white egrets or herons were living there.  Rumor is it's going to be a soccer field.

Also from the roof of my building, but looking SE across campus.  The "first program" (elementary school) building is in the center, girls' dorm on left.  In the distance the tall apartment buildings are where the new commercial center of town is which is one of my options for shopping.  As I mentioned I just walked there for the second time last night.  It took about an hour to get there at a leisurely pace, which was perfect for a Friday afternoon.

This is a view from the edge of the plowed field mentioned above looking south toward the school.  The grass is a sample of what the entire field used to be covered with.  On the other hand, "used to be" is relative as I believe this entire area has been reclaimed in the not-so-distant past from mud flats.  When I was looking at a   I was out here with one of my Environmental Science classes (about which more later) doing an "inventory" of stuff in our environment.

To my point about this whole area being new, this is a satellite image of my area from a mapping program called "mapbox" which I noticed is way out of date because our school is missing (should be upper left), the golf course is missing (should be upper center), the highrise apartment buildings and commercial center are missing (should be lower right).  Google Maps is less out of date but I think they've blurred the images since I started looking at this area when I first got the job a couple months ago.  Possibly at the behest of the ROK gov't for some security concerns? I don't know, but I digress.

Back to school life: Every day we have to "clock in" in the main office using our name badges by 7:45 a.m.  I have my alarm set for 6:30 but I've never woken up to it yet as it begins to get light a little after 5:00 here.  I have a relaxed morning getting ready for work and having a cup of coffee and reading Google News then head over to the school building, clock in, and go up to my classroom, which is the middle school science lab pictured above.  This is one of my two 8th grade science classes, both of which have 12 students in them.  I've pushed all the lab tables to the back of the room and moved some smaller tables up close to the board in the front where I have my desk so I can keep kids in line better through "proximity".

Another view of my room, looking toward the front of the class.

I've mostly had the opaque blinds drawn all the way to keep the heat out (this view faces south) but we finally got some light rain the night before this (last Thurs night) and the next morning was a little cooler and overcast so I opened the blinds for the view.  This is looking across the soccer field.

The first period of each day is only ten minutes long, and is called "Morning House", "House" being one of the three elements of the Dalton Plan first laid down by Helen Parkhurst in the early 20th century.  The other two major elements of the Dalton plan are the "Assignment" (the syllabus-on-steroids I've mentioned) and "Lab" which is just a half hour of tutoring availability each day after lunch when students can visit teachers they need some help from.  Ms. Van Liew (pictured on right), the middle school music teacher, is our main Morning House teacher (we're the 8B group) and I'm the co-house teacher for 8B which means I'm supposed to be doing stuff with data behind the scenes - checking up on kids' grades and online portfolios they're supposed to be creating and making sure they're on track and other stuff I need to look more into and get started on.  In general we show news clips and make announcements during Morning House and on Fridays we have a trivia contest related to the week's news in which various "Dalton Cup" teams (yet another grouping of the students across all middle school grades into four houses - a la Hogwarts in Harry Potter - "Phoenix", "Dalton", "Korea", and "Cheongna" which compete against each other throughout the year in various activities including sports and various academic competitions for the "Dalton Cup".  There are a lot of moving parts at this school!  I've only just begun to scratch the surface.  Dave Brennan (see description below) and I are co-coaches for the "Phoenix" team.

More 8th graders.  Steven (front right) is from China and is an ELL (English Language Learner).  Another guy from Denver, who used to teach at South (Debbie knows him), named Dave Brennan is our ELL teacher here who helps the students who are not as proficient in English.  Steven is a fun guy and one of the students who lives on campus in the boys' dorm.  Steven is just his English name.  I don't want to use students' given names here for privacy concerns.  Most students have English names in addition to their Korean names but not all.

These are (L. to R.) Grant, Evy, and Solomon.

L to R: Shirley, Emmanuel, Kevin, Kevin, and Bonil, with Nahyun with her back to us.

Now to the important part, food!  This is what the dinner scene looks like.  There are actually more teachers than usual here for dinner on this night because it was the 11-12 grade back-to-school night last Thursday from 6-7 p.m. and all teachers who had to stay on campus for that were able to participate in the dinner program which only 4 of us have signed up for so it's usually a smaller crowd.  At this point all the students have left the cafeteria here, which is the same place we have lunch.  It's much more crowded at lunch and a bigger deal with more selection at the main serving windows (both a Korean and Western option everyday) and then stuff at the salad bar as well.

At the back of this picture you can see the serving windows where we get trays and stand in line to be served lunch then come to the salad bar for extra stuff (like salad and cold cuts) but at dinner, a more modest affair, only the salad bar is in operation, though it's not just salad.  I guess there were a few students left.  Dinner is from 5 - 6 p.m. Mon-Thur.  I had come down about 5:30 this evening (though usually I'm there right off the bat) because I needed to be there at 6 for the back-to-school event and I didn't want to have time to kill after eating and before the event.  So it was on the later side for dinner at this point, is what I'm trying to say, and mostly cleared out.

A pretty typical dinner setup.  Kimchi on the right!

My meal that night.  One nice thing about dinner is you can go back as much as you want, unlike lunch.  There was one time at lunch when I was intrigued by both the Korean and Western options so after I finished the Korean option I went back for a helping of the Western option and the next day I got an email from the director of HR (copying someone on the lunchroom staff) saying I had to choose one or the other at lunch.  D'oh!  But there's really not enough time to eat that much at lunch anyway because we only have 30 minutes before we're supposed to be back in our rooms for "Lab" (tutoring) or doing our after-lunch duty which happens once a week (Thursdays for me) and alternates between supervision outside or in the gym or supervising lunch detention for kids who aren't getting tutoring in "Lab".

As I mentioned on this particular night (last Thursday) I had to stick around after dinner for the 11-12 back to school night presentation so I could stand up for a couple minutes and talk about my Environmental Science course (even though I only have 3 students in one section and 6 students in the other.  I don't even know if I had any parents in the audience!)  This is the "small theater" where we have lots of meetings.  Most of our orientation meetings were here and we assemble middle school kids here for student council speeches, etc... and we had the middle school back-to-school event here as well the previous week.

Here's Malcolm, head of high school, speaking at the podium to the parents.  The people with their backs to me are other teachers waiting their turn to be introduced and do their spiel.  This back-to-school only lasted from 6 - 7:15 which was nice because the middle school one the week before had taken over 2 hours to get through.  Some of us teachers had discussed the idea of keeping our presentations short so we could get out of there quicker but apparently some of us didn't get the memo.

During the back-to-school I heard what sounded like rain hitting the windows behind the curtains on my right and when it was over and I went outside I saw that indeed it was drizzling still.  This picture is from my room.  I was pretty excited to get some rain as the weather had been quite monotonous up until now.  It's cooled off a couple degrees in the last couple days and we're forecast to get some more rain tomorrow.  Yay!

 Speaking of now, it's taken me about 2 hours to write this post and it's after 5 now and I still want to get a walk in this evening so I've got to bust a move since the sun is setting about 7 here these days.  So thanks for reading all this and I wish you all a good morning and happy weekend! -- Chris