The School that wasn't a School

This has been a pretty good week.

I (Chris) did go on a field trip last week. It was interesting. We went to a place called Tan Tan School , which didn’t seem very school-like, but we didn’t see it all, so maybe they had classrooms elsewhere. Ironically I was assigned to shepherd one of Jenn’s classes, not the kinder class that I teach. That was due to some bizarre complications that I am not going to go into. So we went there early, I don’t know why, and then the kids had their snack time, squatting on the sidewalk. After snack time we still had 30 minutes or so to kill before we could go in, so we spent some time taking group pictures. When that was done it was time to go in.

Inside, we were ushered into a theater room, which had a stage with a puppet stand on it. We watched a puppet show, in Korean. It was mildly interesting to me, but the kids seemed to like it. The only part I didn’t like was when one of the voice actresses came out (dressed as one of the characters) and went through the audience. The reason I didn’t really care for it was that she went and stood behind my chair and was saying something. Later, one of my kinders (from my class, not Jenn’s) told me that the actress had said I was fat. Thanks!

After this we went up into a long gallery, which was a bad idea since the kids immediately started running at high velocities. We weren’t there two minutes before we went up stairs further into a library. Here everyone spread out and I didn’t have to shepherd the class. A couple of my kids then came and found me. They dragged me around by the fingers and tried to teach me Korean. Normally we are forbidden to speak Korean at all at school, but we were not at school, everything else was in Korean (including most of the books) so I decided to play along. It was fun, and my kids LOVED it!! They played with me and were pretty much attached to me the whole time we were in the library. It was GREAT!!!

After this, it was time to go, and so we teachers rounded up our respective classes and herded them downstairs. When we got downstairs they had a book for each child (the same for each grade), which my kids later told me was too hard for them to read. They seemed sad about this so I tried to encourage them by telling them they could read it next year. After the bus ride back to school, I had a few hours off (we got back early) and then went about my day as normal. It was pretty cool, but mainly because I got to play with a couple of my kids:-)

We have stopped taking Korean lessons as we found we didn’t have the time/will to study it. In addition to this, we found that we didn’t want to go to church since with the Korean lessons it meant that we spent half the day at church, and blocked our easiest opportunity to hang out with some of our friends at church. At this point we have learned enough to get by, and we are still going to try to learn, just not as quickly.

This morning, I got to learn what the fire alarm sounds like. Uggghhh. Before 8 am, on a Sunday, when I didn’t go to bed until after midnight. We weren’t happy. We both figured it was a false alarm, but we did the right thing and evacuated just in case. On the plus side, the fire alarm wasn’t so loud that it damaged my hearing like some are.

Some great news for me: we found a pizza place right next door to us that serves decent pizza, and is cheap. This is really cool, obviously because I like pizza, but also because Pizza Hut is something like $30-40 for a pizza, and our only other options are Mr. Pizza, which doesn’t put almost any toppings on theirs, but is $20, or Costco, which is a bit of a ride to get to for $12. Costco is the best for both price and quality, but is a way off. So this place will serve a decent pizza for $7 that will feed both of us. Very cool indeed!