Chili Pepper Bridge

Chili Pepper Bridge

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

End of a long vacation...

     Well I am now on the final week of my nearly two month (paid) vacation.  I have to say though, I am ready to go back to school.  It will be nice to have some kind of set schedule again (not that I didn't have a ton of fun these last two months!).   I also found out that I will be getting a new mentor teacher this semester.  I will get to met her on Friday when I got back to school.  Hopefully she is as nice and helpful as So Young, my last mentor teacher.  I'm not to worried about it though because So Young will still be at my school, but for only one day a week.  She is doing administration training in YangYang, a little town on the East Sea.  So anyways, my first day back to school is this Friday, but my first class isn't actually until March 12th.  So the next week and a half or so I'll be creating my semester curriculum plan and working on lesson plans for the first week of classes.  I am excited to see my old students again and also to meet my new ones!
     In other news, this past weekend we had the local orientation for the new batch of TaLK Scholars in the Gangwon-do province.  We got just around 27 new teachers (although me and Kevin at still the only ones in Pyeongchang).  It was really cool seeing all the new people and also neat to finally be on the other side of that interaction.  This time I was the experienced one, answering questions and telling people about life in Korea.  It also snowed like crazy while we were there.  Just when some of us thought winter was nearly over, bam, 3 straight days of snow.  I was excited though because it meant some quality snowboarding for my last week of vacation.  We finished up the Orientation on Monday, and the new people got picked up by their mentor teachers, and me and everyone else went back on our own to our towns.  I managed to get back in time to catch the night snowboarding session with one of the EPIK teachers in Jinbu, we also went again today (like i said, the snow was to good to pass up).  Well that's about it for now, I'll probably have more to talk about once I start back up with school again.  Until next time!