Learning!

School Things:

I've just completed day no. 3? of new teacher orientation. I've been here for a full week and I already feel like I have learned a lot. There's just one more day of new teacher orientation, then begins all staff orientation for the year. We'll be going on a retreat in the north eastern mountains 3 hours from school. High ropes and white water rafting are included. Awesome. That'll be Wednesday through Friday.

Through our sessions and meetings during new teacher orientation, I've found a lot of information and inspiration. I believe I am a part of a wonderful school with an administration and staff of integrity and compassion. I can't wait for school to begin! I've been coming up with some fun stuff for my students and I to do together - I hope we learn a lot from each other.

We've gone through the three books they sent us to read over the summer:
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink
Mindset by Carol Dweck

There are so many implications for teaching and learning that come from these three books and I'm very excited that they are being implemented as a part of my school's culture.

Some things are still changing in my teaching schedule, including the addition of something called "Directed Study", and the elimination of 4th grade orchestra. So I'm not really sure what my days and classes will really look like at this point. A complicating factor in planning for me is that I am not responsible for my materials. There's a cultural difference somewhere in the school systems that means that I am required to check out my scores from the school library. The materials I ordered about a month ago were not placed in my classroom or mailbox when they arrived - they were brought to the library to be catalogued, put into their system, labeled (each piece of music, even the students' pieces... numbered, labeled, etc), and put on the library shelf. This includes method books, teacher's editions, scores... everything. So most of what I have in my classroom is students' binders of copies of music they've played at some point. I'm putting pieces together, and the staff at my school have been very helpful, but that was one major difference that I didn't anticipate as an educator.

Life Things:

While my mom was here, we made sure to check a couple things off the tourist list. We balanced our time between school, home, and adventure pretty well. We made it to Dondaemun Market - a giant fabric/craft market and Gyeonbokgung, one of the historic royal palaces. We partook in Shabu Shabu and Korean BBQ with my colleagues and administrators, as well as venturing out on our own to try some gogi mandu. Seriously, I thought, "hey! Maybe I'll drop a few in Korea!" NO. definitely not. There is food EVERYWHERE here, and most of it is pretty darn delicious. I mean, I ate a quarter of a pineapple on a stick at the market yesterday. as a snack. HEAVEN.

Yesterday, I dropped my mom off at the airport. The rest of the new hires who are going through new teacher orientation with me knew this would be hard, so they planned some stuff to keep us all busy. What good friends! I went to a tofu house for lunch (which was quite an adventure...), headed off to the oldest and largest market in Seoul (which was low key because it was Sunday, Thank the Lord) and then hung we hung out in each others apartments, having a great time. I had a chance to use a couple of my birthday presents last night - I made popcorn for my friends! Carah gave me some butter flavored olive oil and popcorn seasonings which made it even better - and we used the Minnesota coasters Maren gave me for my birthday. I am surrounded with love from near and far!

I've been consistently surprised by how urban of an area I live in. I am in Nowon-gu, near the Hagye (hag-eh) subway station. If you look on a map, you'll see that it's quite north of the Seoul city center. Because of my twin cities understanding of city and suburb, I assumed I'd really be walking far to get to the subway and that it'd take an hour to get downtown by subway, and that I'd have to go pretty far to do my shopping. All of those things are false. I live in a densely populated area with MANY businesses, including a dunkin doughnuts below my apartment :) If you walk 1.7 km (1 mile) north of my apartment building it's like times square. At least to my suburban brain. That area surprised me in how many western things were present - there's a mcdonalds (I have another one even closer to my apartment), Outback Steakhouse, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and Krispy Kreme. It's not all western by any means, but I really didn't expect this level of western influence in the suburbs. Overall, though, I've been able to get things here that I was told would be impossible to find (string cheese, cheese in general, butter, oatmeal, etc). So, it seems it's a much smaller world than I had realized!