Dan's First Day of Teaching!

So today was my first day of teaching in Korea. I took a taxi to get to my institute. It was about a 10-15 minute ride there. The trip only cost me about 3000 won each way which is about $3.20. For my first day I ended up subbing for another teacher right off the bat who was MIA for a funeral or something so I taught a lot. I taught classes from 2pm until 10:15pm with a taxi ride to the main institute somewhere inbetween. The kids classes are really easy to teach. You are only in there for like 15 minutes and then you move on to the next class and you do 3-4 of them per hour. During that time the kids asked some questions to get to know me and in the second class a kid asked if I liked to dance and so I showed them some popping. They liked that...the next class I went to was after a 10 minute break and I got asked by the teacher to show the kids breakdancing because she heard about it from the other teacher heh it was pretty cool. I taught 13 kids classes today and two adult classes that were an hour each. I really liked teaching the adult classes. I was the only teacher in there and the students knew enough to where we got things done. I never really thought Id ever be teaching english...I mean I hated english in school. I could see myself as a teacher (and so have other said as well) but an english professor? Well turns out its a pretty good match for me. I own the class room! Its my turf in there and I'm the boss. I can do what I want in there as long as students are learning. And the next best thing is that basically I'm always right and I get to correct everyone else haha! Usually I am very critical about certain details...speech included as Anabel will confirm since I tend to correct Anabel's english from time to time...there is no such thing as "deers". Anyhow, the Koreans seem to have a real problem distinguishing an R from an L as well as an S from a TH sound. But in the first two hours that I was teaching I felt we made progress. I didnt make anyone cry and many of my students thanked me after class (the classes at the university). So far so good for day 1. We'll see if the Korean students will come back or if they were just being nice at face value and are really thinking lets get outta dodge!

~Dan~