Summer Camp

It's on like donkey kong son. I'm back from my vacation in the States. It was nice but I think it was the right length of time. 11 days or so, I never got tired of my Mom cause she's my mom. But by the end of my time and after I saw my friends I was ready to go. Mostly because I knew that I would have to be punished with jetlag. I was, it took me 4 days to get over it but by Monday morning I was ready to go no problem. Other than camp starting and me knowing nothing about what was going on. Anyway back at it. Camp is now a week and a day old, the kids are fun and things are going good. Also Summer is super hot in Korea. It's not so much stupid hot like North Carolina which was reaching the mid 90's by noon while I was there but it's always so humid. Walking to work in the morning when it's around 75-80 I find myself sweating bullets by the end of my 15 minute walk.

Camp is done...

... and I am having a good time. Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I'm not sure how I went this long, thought I had posted more recently but apparently not. I am in the middle of getting ready to buy my ticket to Thailand from where I will take a train and bus to Cambodia. Meet up with a couple people and kick around Cambodia for a week until it's time to head back.
Camp was fun here are some pictures. I got to meet and talk to many awesome kids, the best part I actually got to learn some of my sixth graders names and then I really got to learn some of my future kids names. The rising sixth graders are awesome.



This is outside on our soccer field. We are lucky to have what appears to be a new gym and very new-ish soccer field and track at the school. Several days we went outside and played "Pigu" which is Korean dodgeball. It's different from American dodgeball in that when you are hit you just go to the other side and throw at the other team from there back so basically it's more active. The 2 girls in the forground are 6th graders the boy they are taking aim at is a 4th grader.





This picture is interesting because I am a tourist attraction in it. It should be noted that I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 pictures from this 4 week event and I probably only took half of them. The kid were good and I think they did take some very nice pictures.



These 5th grade girls were particularly hard to crack. I'm not sure how they made it into my class, the top class in the cause they did almost nothing. I look forward to bribing them to be active with candy and punishment in the future.




No real point of this picture I just like this kids shirt.




This is from our cooking class day. I wanted to make rice krispie treats but my co-teacher told me she couldn't find marshmellows. Me and the other teachers went out and found them in a local grocery store. We ended up making cookies it was fun.


Anyway I've got one week to spend as little money as possible in an effort to save as much as possible so I can pay my bills and still run to Cambodia with $300 or so. I'll probably make it easily but it'll be nice to push myself this week. Also I should mention that I'm not actually going to work now, there is nothing for me to do and they said I can stay home until Feb 1 the only thing they said was I couldn't leave the country. Easy enough

Winter Camp is on!!!

Here we are. I'm a week and a half into winter camp and I love it. I get the best kids in the school. I love it, absolutley love it. It's still the same thing, no co-teacher, in the room by myself with the kids but these kids speak English and want to learn. They want to learn!!!! Just today I let my class out on time at 3:20, then I sit down and start to do my post class work. Roll, teaching diary, cleaning up my desk, 3 girls just hung out and talked to me a really good 6th grader, a really good 5th grader and an obviously amazing 3rd grader. Now, just because they are in the highest class doesn't mean that they are perfectly fluent. The 5th & 6th graders can understand me and answer usually in a bit of a stilted sentence but they are making sentences. The 3rd grader is just so cute, the vocab she hasn't learned because she's still in 3rd grade is huge but she obviously understands quite a bit. The kids had to take a placement test and about 37-40 kids got to be in the top class. There was some vocab and sentence structure stuff she nailed it. Only 3rd grader in either of my classes. When we were all talking she would mostly speak in Korean and the 6th grader would translate, talked about their home life, after school life are they enjoying my classes and most important I found out they are in fact learning. Mission Accomplished!!