Here are some pictures!
This is the building I spend most of my time in. It houses the teachers' office, the nurse's office, and the Buddhist temple on the fourth floor. I haven't made it past the first floor.
This is the building where my classroom is. Also inside are the cooking room, art room, music room, and a science room. There are other rooms but I don't know what they are. The music room is next door and sometimes the cute old music teacher comes in and teaches me Korean words and then we play Chopsticks on the piano.
This is my classroom, the English Zone. It was built last year. The English Zone is way more fun and colorful than regular classrooms, which at my school don't even have posters on the walls, other than the periodic table of elements. Unfortunately, as another teacher pointed out to me, this tends to make them think they can talk in class and not do real work.
The view from my classroom window:
Graffiti outside my classroom. So cute. She spelled it wrong. 2NE1 is a super popular four-woman Korean hip hop/pop group and their fans are called Black Jacks. Graffiti in America has a bad connotation but the only graffiti I have seen here is couples' initials at Lotte World and LOTS of Korean boy band names in hearts.
Our grounds are really nice. We have a ton of trees and bushes, a waterfall, a koi pond, and lots of statues.
School is a lot different from an American school. All the students wear a uniform of a knee-length plaid skirt and a white button-down shirt with a plaid bow at the collar. Sometimes they wear cute navy cardigans. All their shirts have their names embroidered on them. Also, they wear normal shoes to school, then exchange them in their lockers for Korean school slippers, which are like white slip-on tennis shoes. I'm not really sure why they do this because I have only seen them take their shoes off in the nurse's office. After school each day the students vacuum the school, mop the floors, and take out the trash. Before school they sweep the driveway as well.
Students arrive at school at 8 or before and school is over at 3:30. However, almost every student stays for after school classes until 5:30. Then most go home and eat quickly and then spend another hour or two in a hagwon, or private academy, learning more English. No wonder my students are always so tired! They tell me that they go to bed between 1 and 3 a.m. each night. I get tired at work and I never stay up past midnight.
I will write more about the social dynamics at my school later but I really love it. I think I might have ended up at Hui Gyeong because I went to a women's college (or maybe not... no idea how the selection process works) but watching my students in action really solidifies my support of women-only education. While other middle school teachers talk about how their female students clam up and can't talk around boys, my students are loud and confident and some of them are so good at speaking English (in terms of accent, grammar, and vocabulary) that I can't believe they aren't Korean-American.
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