park at circle

A native speaker in every school?

I read this at the Chosun News website. 

Under a five-year plan to improve English education announced on Sunday, the ministry will drastically increase the number of native English-speaking teachers at middle schools from the current 221 to at least one for each of Korea’s 2,850 middle schools. It will also boost the number of native speakers at elementary and high schools -- currently totaling 236 and 244 respectively ? depending on local authorities’ budgets. The new English teachers will be taught Korean culture and basic Korean before being let loose on the students.

I'll believe it when I see it. 

Economics aside, I think it will be almost impossible to find enough qualified teachers and very challenging to develop and use an effective curriculum.

I was surprised to see that there are 2,850 middle schools... that seemed little low to me at first.  Personally, I've taught in 16 different ones and visited 10 or 11 others-  and that's just within Busan.

The article says that the plan is from the Ministry of Education.  I work for the Ministry of Education so I'm kind of wondering if my job will be changing or if the program is just expanding. 

In my free time (Ha!) I will have a chat with my supervisor about it.

Official ad

We finally got an ad up...

Nonaim pictures

Here a couple pics of the shop.

The mugs...

The inside...

New Topics

Ha!  No way that's going to happen this week! 

Conversation Test

For the next 2 weeks, I will be traveling to other schools to adminster the still-experimental Conversation Test.

It's kind of a drag but it is a good break from regular classes and it's one of the few opportunities I have to talk to other teachers in my program (normally we each work independently in seperate schools).

It's interesting going to new schools and see new areas of the city, although some of these schools are impossible to get to!  That's part of the fun for me.

This test is in its third year and personally I think it's a waste of time and money.

The purpose is to evaluate the conversational skills of students.  The students get points towards high school acceptance, whatever that's worth.

The test itself is ok, but my problem is that not every student even has the opportunity to take the test and it is not adminstered consistantly.

It's also excrutiatingly boring asking the same 5 or 6 questions 600 times. 

"How long does it take to come to school?"

"If you meet your friend after not seeing him for a long time, what can you say?"

"Could you tell me how to get to the beach?"

Speaking of testing, I gotta be in Dae yeon Dong in 1 hour...  should make it.

No time

Wow.  I've had practically no free time since the shop opened.  It bears reapeating:  Wow.

The opening event was okay.  We gave coupons for a free sandwich on opening day (last Thursday) to 400  university students... only 40 redeemed them. 

Friday was our official opening and we had offered free drinks and cheese and veggie sticks for the party.  We had a good turn out.  Hopefully, word will get out that we are open.

I'm still confident that we will be successful, even though we haven't had time to go over finances in a week (and A LOT has happened).  We have to do that tonight before we lose track of things.

Some pictures of the finished coffee shop will be posted tomorrow... I just realized that I left the camera at the shop.

New topics

Next week, I will start 3 new topics-  Korean news, Busan and Korean language.  Hopefully, they will become regular items so I can stop talking about myself.

Must sleep....

I've slept a total of 7 hours in the last 3 days... not enough.  I'm barely functional.

The soft opening of nonaim cafe went well.  There were fewer customers than we expected but we did give away quite a few sandwiches.

The shop shares a gated alley with 2 other homes and we use it to take the trash out to the stree, a task which I will never do again.

My hands were a little wet when I grabbed the handle on the gate and I got an electrical shock that knocked me to my knees and brought tears to my eyes.  I was not feeling too great for an hour or two after that.

An hour later, one of the neighbors came through the gate and we asked her if she'd ever gotten a shock from the gate.  She looked at me like I was crazy.

Well, whatever, I'm not touching it again.

Twas the night before opening...

The shop is ready.  JH has been here since 8AM-  I had to teach 7 (seven!) classes today so I've only been here since 5PM. 

I normally teach 4 classes a day and believe me, that's plenty.  I taught 3 extra classes today (and scheduled an extra class on Friday) because I wanted tomorrow off for the BIG OPENING.  However, at around noon, my boss called to tell me about a mantatory meeting tomorrow to prepare for conversation tests begining next week (more on this later).  So much for getting the afternoon off!

What makes it worse is this:  If I had not rescheduled my classes before my boss called, then I would not have had to teach OR make up the classes.  As it stands now, I taught the classes AND will attend the meeting.  That's why I get paid the big bucks, I guess.

Well, back to the shop...

It looks great!  We'll probably do a few a things differently when we start franchising as there were a couple minor disasters and miscommunications.

One huge problem is the tables.  The idiot furniture maker made them for midgets and insisted for the longest time that they were standard height.  Finally, he relented and will replace the mini-tables with real ones.

The menu board guy is an illiterate dyslexic-  the whole board has to be redone.

The interior designer is a genius.  I can't believe what he did with this space!  He may be my new hero.  Also, the coffee guy went way above the call of duty.  They might have earned free coffee for life.

Well, it's after midnight and JH is telling me break time is over.  It's time to hit the 24-hour grocery store and get the food ready for tomorrow's event.

Back to yoga

I kind of miss yoga and JH won't have time for anything else, so we will return to yoga class nest week.  I'm looking foward to it and will try to learn more than just the poses.