I've been back home for a while now. I thought that writing this post might be a bit better to do after giving myself a little time to readjust to life in The States! I think some of my biggest takeaways from this experience have been that:
a) There are many generous and kind people willing to help and believe in you if you are willing to do the work and be flexible. I met and got to know so many wonderful people in South Korea and every one of them seemed genuinely interested in my success as a teacher. I did find that as long as I was professional, flexible, and willing to work my experience was very positive! b) It is important to have a sense of adventure and go out of your comfort zone every once in a while (disrupt your patterns). Often, I find myself in a pattern and do the same thing every day. I had to make a point to go somewhere new almost every day! I tried my best to use what Korean I knew/know when I could and not just hope that someone spoke English. I felt that it was important to do things that I would not get to do once I was back home. c) Meaning can bypass language but language is still REALLY important! I am by no means fluent in Korean. I still can't hold a conversation in Korean but I can do a few things. I can order food and ask for things as well as generally communicate in situations where I need something. A lot of my communication in the first few weeks was pointing and saying "please." In the classroom, I learned a few words to help with management and to give some instructions. In these situations, I was usually able to get my meaning across even if it was without language but I still felt the want and need to learn more to really effectively communicate with the people around me. To any anyone interested in study abroad, I would definitely say, "DO IT!" It is definitely worth it! The experience of living in a foreign country and experiencing being fully immersed in a culture that is different from your own is invaluable. It broadens your own views of the world and can help make you a more global citizen. Additionally, it is really fun! I immensely enjoyed my time abroad. I had some of the most fun and rewarding experiences of my college experience. I also had to challenge myself to do more than I might have done than if I had stayed in the U.S. for my student teaching. I feel that I have grown more confident in myself as an individual in the world. As to things I might have done differently, I would have wanted to learn a bit more Korean beyond what I needed for my basic needs. Once I learned how I would fulfill my role within the school, I was easily able to adjust my mindset to really commit to what was expected of me. Overall, I felt really prepared for my experience and through this experience, I have started planning for the next five or so years of my life. I can definitely see myself returning to teach in Korea again in the next five or so years. I can also see myself going abroad to a different place to teach. I would just love to continue to travel the world and eventually reach one of my personal goals of travelling to all seven continents (I have currently been to three of seven!). Overall, this entire experience has been very positive but if I had to describe it in just a few words I think it would be: This experience has been a personal test of patience, willingness to work, and ability to enjoy the small moments that life throws at you. It has been a reminder as to why I enjoy teaching and why I want to be a teacher. It has played a part in affirming my aspirations to become a teacher and reminds me that the work is always worth it. It may take a while for things to happen and it may be tough but it will be worth it in the end.
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Korea and the United states have several things in common but there are a lot of things that are different. There are things I can get and do in the United States that I cannot get or do here as well, there are things I can get and do here that I cannot get or do easily in the United States.
Things I miss from the United States: The space. In America, we have a lot of open space and because of this we have a strong sense of personal space. In Korea, there is not as much open space. I've seen open spaces particularly in parks, the front "yard" of some schools, and on highways. Those are some of the only places where I see a decent amount of open space. Everywhere else, the space is filled by tall buildings that are quite close together. I particularly miss grass. I know it's a bit of a weird thing to say but I miss grass. I have seen hardly any grass here in Seoul outside of one park! Back home, I see grass every day and can touch it, smell it, and enjoy it's grassyness. Here in Seoul, because the city is so dense, there is not much room for grass so there isn't much. I have seen grass though in some parks. Many parks though have no grass at all. They are concrete with some benches or other places to sit. Here in Seoul it doesn't feel common to see a lot of grass so I miss the grassyness of home! Seoul has a lot of ice cream to eat but I have found myself often craving Dairy Queen. There's something to be said about just wanting to eat a blizzard at the end of the day. This trip will be the longest time I have gone without driving in the last four years. It's kind of liberating to not have to drive everywhere (nor do I wish that I had a car here because I think I would get into an accident quite quickly due to the style of driving I have witnessed here) but I miss my boat of a car. I liked being able to go do what I wanted exactly when I wanted. Here, I have to wait for public transit which is perfectly fine because I know how to manage my time but I will be happy to have my car back and be driving again. My apartment here in Seoul doesn't have an oven. This makes it difficult to bake anything. I also do not have a microwave or a microwave oven. My main cooking equipment is a kettle and a hot plate. I'm also lazy and I don't like to do a lot of dishes if I don't have to so I have not actually cooked in the last three months. I have eaten out a lot which is pretty cheap and good/healthy food and I have also eaten a lot of convenience store food! I have quite a few favorite places to eat now. I have missed being able to come home and throw something in the microwave to eat but I also have been forced to go out and explore my neighborhood and try new and interesting foods! Things I'll miss from Korea I love Korean food. It is extremely delicious but my town in the US only has one Korean restaurant and their specialty is bibimbap. Bibimbap is not my favorite Korean food. It is good but There are other dishes that I quite like a lot better. In particular, I LOVE naengmyeon or cold noodles. They are my life! I have eaten them so many times here and I still love them like no other! I cannot easily get this dish in the US. Last time I was in Korea, I came back home and craved naengmyeon for weeks. It was really bad. I'm pretty sure the same will happen to me this time and it makes me sad that I won't have one of my favorite Korean dishes when I want it. I'm also really going to miss the bubble tea chain Gong Cha. I love Gong Cha. Their black milk tea with boba is AMAZING and I am sincerely going to miss it. Gong Cha does have a few branches in California but I'm hoping that eventually, they will expand to the entire US and make my bubble tea dreams come true!! Korean public transportation here in Seoul is quite amazing. The subway is easy to navigate and use. It is also super convenient and goes everywhere! I'm going to miss being able to just hop on and not worry about too many directions and just get to where I'm going! I will definitely miss all of the people that I have met. The students have been so wonderful and the staff at my school has been amazing. They are so wonderful, helpful, and kind! From my experience, the Korean people I have met are generous and kind. They are genuinely excited to share their culture with me and are happy that I am interested in their own culture. Everything is also so convenient here. I have a convenience store less than a minute from my apartment. The subway is about a minute walk from my apartment. My school is about a ten minute walk. Everything is so convenient and I can get anywhere I want to go in about a half hour! It's so great! In the U.S. it can take up to an hour to get to different places. Additionally, Korea and particularly Seoul is open very late. Many businesses don't close until well after midnight and other businesses are open 24 hours! Many places in the U.S. close between 6 and 8 depending on the type of business while Seoul stays open quite late. Korea also has amazing scenery. I am surrounded by mini-mountains/large hills. There is always something to see. The flowers this last spring were also amazing. On my walk to and from school each day, I would see something new every day in the scenery. It was so beautiful! Overall, I really have enjoyed Korea and I like my life in the United States but there are definitely things that I both like and dislike in either place. I think that in coming home, I might experience a bit of reverse culture shock. I feel that I have grown a lot as a person and as a teacher. One thing that will be interesting to readjust to will be eating all of my meals with a fork instead chopsticks and a spoon. I'm not overly concerned about reverse culture shock as I have maintained connections with my family and friends back home but I will have to wait and see how or if reverse culture shock will really affect me and to what degree. I'm hoping that this blog as well as the reflections that I kept during my teaching will support me in both sharing my experiences and transitioning back into my home culture. I also took many pictures to document my daily life so that I can share this experience with both my family and my friends.
In order to keep my study abroad experience as a key factor in my life, I hope to continue to foster the relationships that I have developed here both in professional relationships I have made in the school and the more personal relationships that I have maintained with family of my friends in the United States. I also hope that in the next 5-10 years I can return to Korea and teach again. There are many programs to facilitate this within Korea. I think that it would be a great way to continue to grow as both an educator and as a person. I also hope to continue to develop my Korean language skill. I am able to read Hangul (written Korean) and I can understand a small amount of what I read. I can also understand more that is said to me particularly in regards to food but I am not particularly skilled at speaking or writing Korean. My productive skills are lacking but I would hope that by the time that I might return to Korea my skills would improve a bit! I also plan to find ways to incorporate what I have learned particularly about English language learners in my school into my own future classroom and to use that knowledge to better my skill as a teacher. In Korea, there is a large population and very little space. This means that there are many apartment complexes with many floors. I live in a small apartment complex and I am on the third floor in this walk-up. My apartment building is one of many in the neighborhood that are all sandwiched together. The streets are also quite small. They can fit about one car! I'm also quite close to a subway station. I am probably a 1 minute walk away from the subway! Overall, my neighborhood is pretty quiet and very chill, even though we are very close to a busy main street. In addition to being heavily populated, Korea likes to stay up late. Many places do not open until the afternoon and they stay open until very late. This means that my night owl tendencies work perfectly here! I usually do get up reasonably early though! I usually have some kind of bread or pastry that I've bought for breakfast. Korean bakeries make this delicious sweet red bean paste filled bread and other delicious pastries that I love to eat!In Korea, there is a large population and very little space. This means that there are many apartment complexes with many floors. I live in a small apartment complex and I am on the third floor in this walk-up. My apartment building is one of many in the neighborhood that are all sandwiched together. The streets are also quite small. They can fit about one car! I'm also quite close to a subway station. I am probably a 1 minute walk away from the subway! Overall, my neighborhood is pretty quiet and very chill, even though we are very close to a busy main street. In addition to being heavily populated, Korea likes to stay up late. Many places do not open until the afternoon and they stay open until very late. This means that my night owl tendencies work perfectly here! I usually do get up reasonably early though! I usually have some kind of bread or pastry that I've bought for breakfast. Korean bakeries make this delicious sweet red bean paste filled bread and other delicious pastries that I love to eat! After this, I walk to my school. It's about a ten to fifteen minute walk depending on the traffic light and how fast I decide to walk up the slightly steep hills of my neighborhood. When I get to my school, I change my shoes into my indoor slippers to avoid getting too much dirt in the school. This is something that every student and every teacher does. It's really neat and it means that I get to wear extremely comfortable shoes all day! I teach a class almost every period. After four periods, it is then lunch time. Lunch is a little different at our school. The school orders the lunch in every day and it is delivered to every classroom. Each class has their own lunch cart that sits in the hallway and near the end of fourth period the carts get filled. We all bring our lunch cart with the different foods on it into the classroom or staff room. There are trays for the food and spoons and chopsticks for silverware. We all serve ourselves lunch from the provided food. Every day is something different but there is always rice, soup, and some kind of kimchi. The other foods could be a protein or a starch or a fruit or vegetable. Sometimes we get special juice or yogurts. It's a delicious surprise every day! We then clean up our cart and put it back into the hallway where the food containers are whisked away to be returned for another day. After lunch, I teach a few more classes and eventually the day ends and I head home. By the time I get home, it is just about dinner time. Now, in Korea, eating out is not too expensive. A lot of times, buying and cooking all of your food can be more expensive than simply eating out. So, I usually go home and then I go out to eat somewhere in my neighborhood. There are MANY places to eat near my apartment. I can always go to the convenience store that is a 30 second walk from my apartment or I can go and get kimbap down the street or ddukbokki and twigim across the street. I can walk a little further and go get naengmyeon or cold noodles. I can even go get Burger King if I want. There are so many options and all of them are delicious! Usually, I'll go out to eat and then depending on how I feel, I will go back home and rest until the next day but sometimes, I go and explore different areas of my neighborhood. In doing this, I've found parks, fun restaurants that I want to try, and small street markets where they sell lots of different foods and goods. It's really fun to see all of the different things that are in my neighborhood!
Now on weekends, when I'm not teaching, I like to go out into Seoul and explore wherever I can. I've been to many different places so far! I've been to Gangnam, Itaewon, Insadong, Hongdae, and Myeongdong which are all different districts in Seoul. I just hop on the subway and go wherever I want. Currently, it's cherry blossom season so this weekend, I'm planning on going out to a few different parks to see the beautiful cherry blossoms in bloom. I have now been in Seoul for about one month. I can't believe that I'm almost halfway done with my program. I've really enjoyed myself so far, and my school and all of the teachers have been amazing! In starting this experience, I was expecting something that was very similar to the experiences I had student teaching in America. I did not quite get what I was expecting. I'm treated more like a full fledged teacher here and it is quite interesting and nice. I also think I'm probably the school's first student teacher so that is pretty special. I think what has surprised me most about this experience is how welcoming everyone has been. Every person in the school is extremely nice, helpful, and welcoming. Everyone from my cooperating teacher to the principal are so kind and helpful. On our of my first days, the other native English speaker in the school who is contracted by the government to teach English and I were eating lunch with the other teachers and we all together decided that it would be great to have a bit of a language exchange. Almost everyday on the white board in our staff room, we write words or phrases in both English and Korean so that we can all learn a bit about each other. Thankfully, I am picking up more and more Korean as time goes on and I'm pretty excited about that. I can order food in a basic way and I can make small comments about things. I'm not good at holding an actual conversation but I can get by alright. Also, thanks to the language we share as a staff, I know a lot of random words and sentences! I can say, "Tomorrow, we will plant flowers." 내일 우리는 꽃을 심을거야 (Naeil oorineun kocheul shimulkeoya)! I've also reached out a few times to people who I know in Seoul and we have been getting together and having a great time! Overall, I'm achieving my goals and this experience is turning out to be what I hoped for and even more!
In being here, I have found that the Korean culture is a very welcoming culture. I was invited to play badminton with the other staff during one of my first weeks here and now I play with them every week! We all eat food together and play badminton in a very friendly environment. Also, as a whole school including students and parents, we planted flowers in a schoolwide initiative to make the school beautiful. I worked with staff members and families just to do something fun and good for the school. Culturally, according to my cooperating teacher, teachers in Korea are viewed as very important and as they are employed by the government, they are taken very seriously. There is less directly visible parent involvement in the school but there is so much support for students and the school from the parents and the community. I think a lot of this experience is enhanced by just saying yes. I trust the people in my school and the people who I work with in my program very much. They have shown that they are very considerate, thoughtful, and generous people who want to help and share their culture with me. Because I have been to Seoul and Korea before, I came into this experience with a few expectations but I maintained a very open mind. I have had an amazing past month or so and I would definitely recommend that anyone considering going abroad go for it and remember to keep an open mind and not be afraid to say yes. It has been two weeks since I arrived in Seoul. Now that I’m here, I’m really enjoying a lot of things about Seoul! Everything is really close and convenient. I have two convenience stores within 1-5 minutes of walking distance. These convenience stores have EVERYTHING! There is packaged and processed food and there is fresh food like eggs, meat, vegetables, and fruit. There are also household items and cleaning supplies among many other things. I’m also very close to the subway station. This means that I can go basically anywhere quickly for quite cheap. I’m also really close to the school where I’m student teaching. It makes my mornings really easy! There are so many things that I really like about Seoul, it's hard to name them all!
There are a few things that are challenging. Culturally, Korea stays up very late. Though I like staying up late, I think it's a bit tough for me to stay up late on a school night. I'm also having to learn a lot about speaking Korean. I wish that I would have studied a bit more Korean but I'm getting by. I can say a few things and get my point across as well as understand the point of the person with whom I'm speaking but it's still a challenge. There's also a difference in personal space! Overall, Seoul is living up to my expectations and very often exceeding my expectations which is great! So, I'm learning a bit about personal space in Korean public spaces.
I had read online before I came to Korea that because Korea is such a small country and there are so many people, it is common for people to bump into other people and not really worry about it. People wouldn't say sorry or excuse me because it was so common and normal. I'm really seeing this now. It's really weird for me! When I was walking around and shopping in Myeongdong, I was often in a tight spot with a lot of people around me. I was bumped into several times and I even bumped into other people a few times. It really wasn't a big deal and even when I said "excuse me" to pardon myself, people didn't really care. It was an interesting feeling. The same thing happened on my subway ride home. On the last leg of my subway journey, there were so many of us in the car that I couldn't move. People weren't being rude or pushing and shoving. It was very civilized and everyone was very chill about it. Again, it was weird for me but I think I could get used to it. Things here at my school are going really well! I've co-taught one English lesson so far and I have taught a lesson about my hometown(s). Because I am in a public Korean elementary school, a lot of the instruction during the day is in Korean. This means that it is really hard for me to be a regular classroom teacher. Instead, I am what the teachers call a "subject teacher" my job is essentially to provide English instruction as a native speaker of English as well as to share lessons about my home culture. I am planning on teaching a 10 week (one lesson per week) unit on America and American culture. The scary thing is I will be teaching these lessons to all of the grades in the school. First grade through sixth grade. That is kind of scary but I'm really excited to take on this role of being a bit of an EFL (English as a foreign language) specialist which is extremely similar to my endorsement that would allow for me to teach ELLs (English langauge learners) back home. I will essentially be teaching the same lesson to every class but it will be tailored to meet the language and developmental abilities of each grade. I'm supposed to start with some fourth and fifth grade classes on Thursday so I hope it goes well!
Last night, we as a school went out to dinner! It was really great! We ate a lot of traditional Korean foods and we also went out for coffee afterwards. I posted pictures of this in the pictures page here. (Click it, it will take you to the picture page :) ). I had a lovely night and tried several new foods like stingray/skate. It had a good taste but the texture was very different from how it looked. I had a lovely time after school today with several of the teachers. Every Tuesday, the teachers get together to play badminton and have a good time. I really enjoyed badminton all throughout school but I never really had the opportunity to play it recreationally so it was really nice to be able to go play a fun sport with several of the teachers from the school (even the vice principal!). It was a great time! I really enjoyed how we could all play a sport together and not really need to use our language. We were all simply having fun! I am now glad that I was forced to take some of those PE classes in school :) knowing some of the rules to badminton came in handy! I know this post was a lot of different things smashed together but a lot has happened in just a few days! Please go look at the pictures page if you want to see some of the pictures that I have taken while I've been here! It's a bit more interesting than just reading all of this :). I am so excited to go to Korea and begin my student teaching! I’m really hoping to learn a lot about the Korean language and to have a unique experience within a school. Because I will be teaching in an elementary school, I am excited to gain more experience and pick up some new skills in working with students who are English language learners! I am also excited to learn about Korean culture and how it is both different from and similar to my own culture. In preparation for my experience, I have done a bit of specific research in relation to my host school such as what the neighborhood is like and what is taught in the school. I have been in touch with my cooperating teacher to learn a bit about the Korean National Curriculum that is taught in schools. Although I have only been learning about my host school for a short time, I have been learning about Korea and Korean culture for a while. I have been interested in Korean pop music and through that I have discovered different people who have blogged about life and culture in Korea. I also have several friends who grew up in Korea and have shared parts of their culture with me. I have also previously visited Korea as a tourist and I am very excited to visit again as a student teacher. There are a lot of things that I am excited about for this experience. I’m excited to meet new people who are in the same profession as I am but may have a different perspective that I can learn from. I am also excited to learn more about the Korean language and pick up as much as I can. I’m also excited for all of the delicious Korean food that I will get to eat! Although I am excited for a lot of things, I’m a bit nervous about getting to know the neighborhood and community that I will be living and working in. I want to be able to get to know this community and do my best to be a part of it. I’m not always the most outgoing person which can make this hard but I hope to do my best to make this experience great. Some ways that I have strategized to do this are to get to know my mentor teacher as well as my supervisor and principal because they are already members of this community and will have a lot of knowledge to share with me about where I will be living and working. I’m also hoping to reach out to people who I already know and have met in Korea. This would help for me to get out and do more things and get to know the country even better. I’m already really excited for this trip and I am looking forward to the experiences I will have in this program. This will be a new adventure but I am hoping it will be amazing! |
AllisonThese are the chronicles of my time before, during, and after student teaching in South Korea! Archives
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