First two weeks part 1....

My second day here, I was required to head to the clinic to have my physical so that I could apply for my alien registration card.  What that meant was that I had to avoid food for 12 hours before I took it.  No big deal.  Yet.  After the physical in the morning, the director of the school, Jackie, took me out to lunch along with one of the other late arrivals, Paul.  We each had soup.  It was a baby chicken stuffed with sticky rice, one ju ju be, and three ginko nuts.  The soup was good but pulling apart a baby chicken with stainless chopsticks and trying to have a polite conversation at the same time is difficult.  I did my best.  But I had to keep pulling little rubbery bones from my mouth while talking.

As it turns out Paul had done some work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where I installed "Some Assembly Required"  He is good friends with the temp installer that I stayed with for a week after installation named Chris.  Small world.  The NYC synchronicity continues.   

After lunch, Jackie takes me into a conference room and we start to go over basic thing like how each class should go, and where to find text books, etc.  We do this for several hours, and at this point I've been up since 4 in the morning (jet lag) and needless to say my energy was flagging.  This would account for my absolute confusion, stupid questions, and blank stares I was giving Jackie throughout the entire discussion.

Jackie was getting tired of this and frankly I wasn't gleaning any valuable information at this point for the reasons previously stated.  So we bagged it, and the the next day they tossed some students at me.

In my first class I had a 8 yo kid named Henry who was running around the room and refused to stay in his seat.  I set a chair in the corner and he proceded to knock a cork board that was leaning in the corner over on himself to the delight of the other students.  Then he tied his sweatshirt hood strings together in a knot around the back of the chair and started dragging it around the room like a ball and chain.  So I called a manager and had him removed from the class.  Each class has a Korean faculty who's responsible for curriculum.  She's called a manager.  When Henry came back he was much quieter.  I've since figured out that in fact he is quite a bit better at english than the rest of the class and gets bored in class easily.  I've got two classes that are hard to handle.  The first is that class.  7 kids about 8 years old.

The other is a gang of 6  ten yo boys.  The rest of my classes are advanced english speakers of varying ages, which require mostly reading books and discussing them along with vocabulary from the books.  I'll be doing 4 per month plus writing some of the quizzes and comprehension questions for the chapters.   I only teach from 3 til 7 every day.  In the mornings I have no kinder kids like I was told on the phone, so I can do prep work, and special projects.  I've already made worksheets for a grade one science book,  I'm assuming that there will be more of these in the pipeline.  

Enough of the boring school stuff.  Lets see what I've been doing in my spare time.