These are my new running shoes. If you think they look masculine, that's because they are.

I've been doing a lot of running in this past month, about 5 times a week. The other day I noticed while I was out, that my foot was really starting to bother me. When I finished, I took of my socks and shoes... I had a blister! I was suprised that I'd worn a hole in both of my shoes from all the running.

I went downtown Sunday afternoon and picked these up at ABC Mart. The salesman had good English, and told me there were no womens shoes that would fit me. I wasn't suprised at all. I had to choose from the mens, and these were the best option.

The salesman gave me a 5,000 won discount, and then a 5,000 won coupon for my next purchase. I would consider using it... if they had womens shoes that fit me.

These are the score results for my low level grade 1 students. This was an 11 question vocabulary quiz, based on vocabulary from High School Musical songs, which we've been studying for the last two weeks. The quiz was a mixture of matching English to Korean (which most students got all correct), spelling, fill in the blank, and sentence jumble (which only a few students got correct).

I really thought they would do worse than they did. I asked my co-teacher, Ms. Jeong, how they did recently on the listening test, and she replied, "Oh, very well, I think, maybe, 40% or 50% score." I guess that is an improvement over the average 30% score on the final they took at the end of July. And then I can't really complain about them getting around 7 or 8 correct.

There's lots of money to be made in tutoring...

From the Korea Times:

"A Korean private tutor was caught earning more than 150 million won ($130,000) a month, without paying tax, from illegally teaching students in an apartment in the affluent southern Seoul.

Under the law, adults who are engaged in private tutoring are obliged to report their monthly income to the education authorities, a measure to prevent tax evasion. But many tutors ignore the rule.

He allegedly taught a group of students in a 337 square-meter (102 pyeong) apartment, charging about 10 million won per student per year. This is the first time that a tutor who has taken such a large amount of tutoring fees has been caught."

It doesn't say what he taught, or for how long. I can't imagine how long he'd been doing that! $130,000 a month!! Parents here really will pay a lot for their children to have a good education... I wonder how much his penalty will be!

My Students

I know I haven't posted anything for a while, school's been really busy. The week after Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving next week) I have my first open class. I've never done one before, so my co-teacher and I are frantically trying to finish the lesson by this week. It needs to be submitted before Chuseok break.

Here's some projects my students have done recently. First, we practiced the simple past with my low level students while learning about ice cream and summer time. They were supposed to each write four sentences about what they did this past summer, on average, each student got about 1 correct sentence. Then, I put the correct sentences up in the EOZ.



My advanced students wrote stories about their summer, my co and I helped edit them, then they wrote their final draft on t-shirts or shorts they'd cut out of origami paper. They turned out cute, and the students are still looking at them before class, even though they've been hanging up for about 2 weeks. There's a lot of them, I couldn't fit them all in the picture.



And finally, here are some of the kids during lunch time. The 20 or so 8th grade boys that usually come in are getting out of control, we've been talking about closing the EOZ during lunch because it's too chaotic, and they don't speak English when they come. However, these 7th graders are too adorable!

Low Sodium Kimchi?

The Korean Food and Drug Administration is starting a campaign to reduce the amount of sodium in Korean Kimchi. It's about time!

Koreans eat kimchi at every meal, but there is so much salt in it, that it pushes the average Koreans daily sodium intake to over 4,553 milligrams. Remember, the WHO's recommendations is only 2,000 a day.

I always knew it was salty (due to the high amounts needed during the fermentation process), but never knew it was this high. I only eat it once a day, typically at lunch, maybe two times if I eat Korean for dinner. When I cook at home, I take special care not to add any salt to my cooking because I know I'm getting plenty in my school lunches.

I just wonder, if kimchi is that salty, how much salt is in the other dishes at school lunch??

Gwangju Kimchi Festival, 2009 (광주 김치 문화 축제 2009)

Monsoon Season Over, Typhoon Season Begins

My guy friends told me that while they were camping on Jejudo in July, a typhoon hit. Of course, I didn't believe them because they're always exaggerating. However, now I believe that it may have happened.

So says the Korea Times:

"A typhoon is fast approaching the Korean Peninsula, with heavy rains and winds forecast for Thursday.

Jeju Island is expected to be hit first, Wednesday, and then the entire country will be drenched through Thursday, the KMA said.

In particular, heavy rains of more than 120 millimeters are expected on the southern and western coasts.
“Some regions may see torrential downpours of more than 40 millimeters of rain per hour,” Kim said. "

It looks like Gwangju will be hit hard, because we're southwest. The clouds already today (Wednesday) are incredibly dark.

On a side note, I've been back for a week and a half at this point, and didn't see the sun until this morning. It's sad when that nice weather is replaced by typhoon-like conditions...