school visit / home visit

Our visit to the high school was the highlight of the trip so far. I teamed up with the other teacher from NYC, ( who happens to share my name and be my age!) and we planned our "lesson" together about NYC landmarks and NYC maps. Together, we had a bunch of NYC postcards (over 100) and gave out several to each student. Then, we gave out NYC maps and had them find the landmarks on the maps. The students were incredibly enthusiastic, I have to say. We walked in and they started cheering - how often does that happen in life? ;) I had learned to introduce myself in Korean, and so I did - more cheers! They had a lot of questions about going to school in the US - how many hours do students study, what kind of music do they like, etc... We did our lesson, and then they wanted to take pictures with us. Finally, we gave out jolly ranchers, and more cheers. It was really fun talking with the students. These students knew English very well, and in our particular class, they were also studying Japanese. Since it was an international (and private) school, every student knew 3 or 4 languages. Pretty amazing. The other amazing thing, I thought, was that their school day goes from 7:30 AM to 10:30 PM! Everyone stays at school studying that late (mandatory), and then many travel from over an hour to get to school - so they take the public city bus home at that hour!






One student, who introduced himself as Brian (his "American" name, he said), was my tour guide at the school. He had lived in Orlando, Florida when he was 9 and 10, and so his English was excellent. What was interesting was that his father had sent him, his brother, and his mother to the U.S. while he himself (the father) stayed and worked in Seoul because he wanted his boys to learn English and learn to be Americans. Brian said his mother missed his father too much, and so they went back to Seoul. Brian took me and another American teacher to his house for a traditional Korean dinner. His father picked Brian and us up from school, and it took us an hour and a half to get to their apartment in the Friday afternoon traffic - the streets were like parking lots. Once we got there, the grandmother had cooked because the mother was away on a business trip (she worked in insurance, apparently, while the father was a banker). The grandmother didn't eat with us, though - only Brian, his father, me, and the other teacher sat at the table. It was an incredible meal - the best I've had so far in Korea! The father wanted to talk about American politics more than he wanted to tell us about Korea, but he was very nice. Here's the picture below. I am absolutely exhausted and kind of hot (no AC, long day of lectures and school visit). At the end of the evening, around 9 PM, Brian had to go to a math tutoring class (9 PM on Friday night, mind you!) and so the father took us back on the subway to our hotel (to avoid the traffic) and then insisted on getting us tea at the hotel lobby restaurant. I gave him a small book on NYC architecture I had bought at the Met.