New School: The Honeymoon Phase

This week has been "prep week" at my new job. I don't meet my students until tomorrow, but I'm probably working 5x harder than I will be when I actually do start teaching because I've been trying to get the classroom ready. I've never had to do this before (or ever really had my own classroom before), and it's a lot of work. I'm lucky to have 2 co-teachers helping who are hard workers too.

The first thing that shocked me about this school was that I was given a schedule for the whole year. There it was: my vacation (9 days in the summer and 9 over Christmas), public holidays and special events listed out for me. These days were a closely guarded secret at my previous schools and this way makes it much easier to plan ahead!

Also I can't get over all the SUPPLIES we have! Usually in schools the paper is hidden and you have to beg for a new white-board eraser, but every teacher was given 4 big packages of white paper to start with, dozens of packs of colored pencils, sketch books, glue, scissors and any craft supplies you can think of. There's also computers and projectors in every class which helps to mix the lessons up a bit. The books are all shiny and new and the kids are all being given red leather knapsacks and new uniforms.

My schedule is bitchin'! I have a co-teacher who handles 40% of the class load so, for example, on Mondays I teach my kids for exactly one half-hour. Not every day is that awesome, of course, but I never teach more than 2 1/2 hours day, so I'm really hoping to get most of my lesson planning done at the school instead of at home. Every teacher I've met keeps telling me what a great place it is to work and many of them are on their 3rd or 4th contract... this is so rare in ESL, so I have high hopes.

The most notably awesome thing about my school is that there is a giant slide connecting the first floor to the basement.

This is my classroom. I'm teaching the "panda" class and I will have twelve 7 year-olds.

We even have a panda clock :P

One thing about the school day is that we have to eat lunch with the kids. My Taiwanese BFF Kris nicknamed me "Picky mouth", so you can probably assume how excited I am to be force fed a Korean school lunch every day. Luckily the school gives us the menu a whole month in advance and there are several fridges and microwaves, so if we want to bring our own meals we can. They also have a daily ham and cheese-uh option which I will probably be taking advantage of quite a bit. And there's a McDonalds in the same building. I see a lot of Big Macs in my future.

Even the toilets are baby-sized! The one on the left is for teachers only.

Wish me luck with my kids tomorrow. I only have them for an hour and we have a busy lesson of coloring planned. Go pandas!