Summer Vacation Part 1: "Summer Camp"

So, it's been summer vacation here in Korea, which has unfortunately resulted in my taking a vacation from this blog. The one-month vacation has been roughly divided into three parts. The beginning was summer camp hell where I had to work 12-hour days teaching English camps at three different schools. The middle was my actual vacation, where Nick came to visit (YAY!) and we took a trip together. And the end, which is now, is basically a really easy schedule where I only work 3 hours per day teaching free-talk conversation classes.  With much encouragement from my parents and sister, I've decided to finally ease back into my normal life (wow, is this normal now???) and catch up on my blog a bit.

After how insanely busy the first part of my summer was, I feel really decelerated right now.  I'm finding that despite the fact that I spend only 4 hours per day at school I'm still accomplishing absolutely nothing at home. I need to do my laundry from vacation. I need to write lesson plans for next semester. I need to write a blog. But instead I sleep late, watch American t.v. online and catch up on facebook.  It might just be the result of exhaustion from the first part of my summer and a little bit of post-Nick depression.

Summer vacation for these poor kids is not a vacation, and as a result it's not really a vacation for their teachers either. The first week of vacation is spent in summer camp. When I think of summer camp I think of cabins in the mountains near a little lake; with horseback riding and arts and crafts and playing pranks on a rival cabin. In Korea, "summer camp" is simply a deceiving way of saying "12-hour days studying one subject intensely".  Luckily, I'm that crazy foreign teacher with her unconventional ideas... so I tried to make my camps more entertaining for the students, as opposed to a non-stop academic death camp. We had cooking class and made spaghetti, we had a water balloon toss and a photo scavenger hunt.  And while it was fun, it was also exhausting to keep everything running smoothly all day.

Photo Scavenger Hunt: "All members of the group jumping"

Photo Scavenger Hunt: "All members of group brushing their teeth"

I was especially stressed about this camp because one teacher at my school, Sister Tobia, had been talking crap about it all week. Sister Tobia is a special character in my Korean experience. Nobody in the convent likes her. In an earlier blog I talked about how Sister Pia gossips about her incessantly. And I can understand why. The woman is a nightmare. She lies and throws me under the bus on a regular basis. She is constantly trying to undermine the amazing English program that Sister Pia and I are building at that school. Apparently our principal, Sister Rita, has tried to have her moved to another position somewhere else and their Mother Superior said "tough cookies no on else can stand her either, she's your problem."

So Sister Tobia told her 2nd and 3rd grade students not to join my camp because it would be "too easy" for them and "too disorganized" because of the number of students. To her second comment I say, 50 students in a camp with only one teacher (and Sister Pia as an assistant) is an extraordinary number, but this woman is quite unwise to underestimate my organizational skills.  And to her first comment, she'd be shocked to find out how advanced the 1st graders are in comparison with her 2nd and 3rd graders.  I ended up with 45 first graders and only 6 second and third graders at my camp, and a feeling like I now needed to prove myself.

All of my students at summer camp!

I'm seriously so in love with my middle school grade 1. They are the best students anyone could ever ask for. They're enthusiastic, eager to learn, and they always try their best.  Because of that, I can give them such challenging projects and they continuously amaze me with their outcomes. For summer camp we did a project where the students put together a news cast. They were in groups of 4 or 5 and they had to make one breaking news story, one special report, and one weather forecast. Plus they had to have anchors to tie it all together. Outside of those rules, some real news examples and some helpful vocabulary, I gave them nothing else. The second and third graders of course had a heart attack. Without specific guidelines and parameters for a project they were at a complete loss for what to do next. They struggled the entire camp.  My first graders, however, have had a great deal of practice during their monthly English camps with this type of work.  Every 1st grade group blew me away. A few teams made their newscast entirely on video. One group made video clips and had live news anchors who would cut away to the clips for the reports. One group made an impressive interactive powerpoint to have temperatures and weather indicators pop up on a map as they explained the next week's weather. The 2nd and 3rd graders eventually got the hang of it after a slow start, but they admitted to me that it was extremely difficult. Take that Sister Tobia!