A New Job Site

My school, Kate LA, moved a couple weeks go. Originally it was two branches, each with a few teachers (ours had four, I think the other one had three), about a half mile away from each other. I was in the first branch.

Here's what you see walking into the first branch. The four classrooms are on the right, and two offices, the restrooms, and the resource room are on the left. You can't really see it, but that decorative glass back there has the No Child Left Behind name and symbol, which is kind of Kate LA's platform. It's kind of ironic and appropriate, since the school's ideal is to make sure everyone gets an opportunity to get a quality education in English, but there are still a number of classes that are geared toward just teaching the test. This seems to be half of the Korean education method; the other half is rote memorization.


Our old resource room:



This was my old classroom, the smallest of the four, since I was the newcomer:


The kids below are from my youngest/lowest class. They're first graders. All monsters.

Wendy and Lucy:


The peace sign is pretty much obligatory for Koreans posing for pictures.
Wendy, Lucy, and Albert:


These two are real hams:


Albert, Wendy, Lucy, Martin, and Erin:


All the pictures I make the kids draw:



The only one not yet named is Celina, sitting at the desk in the middle:



Because the second branch is bigger, and Heather was straining herself too much trying to maintain a principal presence at both branches, she and her brother decided to move the whole operation over to the second branch. It's big enough to fit all of us, and it has a big teachers' office and a computer lab. Plus there's a hot chocolate machine, where you can get a tiny amount of hot chocolate, but it's only 100 won (at the current exchange rate, about 8 cents).

Here is the much slicker entrance to my new worksite:



And the teachers' office, pretty much the only room with windows, unfortunately:


Next door, the computer lab:


Here's the entrance from the hallway. That's the teachers' office behind the glass, and the big desk is to the right, out of view.


The resource room, regrettably smaller than the last one, but the other photocopier is in the computer lab, so that's cool:




Outside the resource room is a hallway that leads to most of the classrooms. I hate stupid motivational signs like these:



Then the hallways takes a left turn and you get another hallway. My classroom is the last one on the left, which you can't really see. That's Albert again, in his Taekwondo uniform.


Here's my new classroom:



There's no window, so last week I had all my classes make pictures of things they might (or might not) see outside for our imaginary window:


All these papers you see all over the wall are my learning tools--The 8 Parts of Speech, Irregular Verbs, Useful Sentences (that they always screw up), Regular Past and Present Tense. I try to teach the kids as little as possible and let the wall do most of my work.





Except for having no window and having to walk a lot longer to work (I have a tight schedule on yoga mornings and every minute counts now), I'm pretty happy with the move. The teachers from the second branch are all cool, and it's nice to have a little more room to move around. I also have my own AC in the room. Boo ya.