First Day of Work

Some first-day shots:



The teacher's room at LCI... Everyone is pretending to work


The WSU crew at LCI. too bad the boys are leaving next week :-(

I woke up today saying to myself “this isn’t really happening…” and dreading getting out of bed to go to work. I was so nervous to be in a classroom full of kids even though I knew I wasn't actually teaching today. I had no idea what to expect or how the day was going to go. We walked to the school, LCI, with three girls that live on our floor of the apartment, they are all really nice so far and I felt comfortable right away. We stopped at Dunkin Donuts on the way to pick up some coffee. The walk to the school is about 20-25 minutes, not to bad, but it’s freezing outside!! I like Korea so far, but the weather sorta puts a damper on it. Once we arrived at LCI, we had to take our shoes off and put on slippers that we would wear for the entire day. A little different but I like it, better than standing in heels all day! The teachers have a teacher’s room that we spend all of our out-of-class-room time in where we each have a desk and a cubby to keep our belongings in. We had the first period to just sit and hang out, introduce ourselves to the Korean teachers and drink coffee before Tia, Katie and I were assigned teachers to shadow all day. I was with one of the girls who live on our floor, Ta-Leah, while Tia was with Kevin and Katie was with Daniel, who also went to WSU. Ta-Leah is one of the best teachers so I was happy to follow her and learn how to interact and teach the kids. All of the students are between the ages 5 and 7, with the majority being 6 year olds. Oh, and if you didn't already know, Korean kids are the cutest things I’ve ever seen!!!! I love all of the kid I met today! They are all so adorable and full of energy. Not sure how I will keep up, but when they call me Bri Teacher, smile, and wave at me, it makes me so happy and excited to be their teacher on a regular basis. They all speak excellent English, so it’s easy to communicate. Ta-Leah has been here for 10 months, so she speaks and understands a lot of Korean, so when the students do speak Korean, she can answer them and tell them to speak in English. Hopefully I catch on really fast. I spent most of the day sitting back and observing, except in 3 or 4 classes I got to play and interact with the students. They look at me funny because I have red hair, but by the end of the day, most of them seemed to warm up to me. One little boy said I have orange hair like a carrot... it was really funny and I just said “good job” because he knew the color orange and the word carrot haha.

After work Daniel and Kevin took Katie, Tia and I to Pho, a cute restaurant down the street. It was the first restaurant we’ve been to that has a menu in English, so that was nice. I order some sort of noodle seafood salad that looked good in the picture on the menu and it only cost 7,500 won- which is about $6.50 USD. It was so nice to sit and talk to the boys about their experience here and get some great advice. This is their last week here, so they knew what they were talking about and got us really excited about the year to come! They said that Korea is a blast, so we have a lot to look forward to- especially the trips to Bali and Thailand we are planning for our breaks. We took a taxi home, which the restaurant called for us- love that convenience- I was impressed with Kevin’s ability to tell the driver directions in Korean, cant wait ‘til I can do that. I am exhausted now, probably should be unpacking and setting up my empty apartment with all the stuff I bought at E-Mart yesterday, but will most likely postpone until tomorrow J