chicken ass

Today was my first day of teaching actual English classes. By 4pm I thought I was going to fall asleep standing up. My schedule is as follows...I don't have any classes until 10:50, but I am pretty much teaching nonstop classes from 10:50-3:50. I am teaching all of the 4th and 5th grade students, so I have 15 of those classes a week. I am also teaching a 5th grade, 6th grade and 3/4th grade advanced English classes, as well as a teacher class once a week. I only see each class once a week, so that makes getting to know my students kind of difficult. I have about 33 students in each class, so that totals over 400 students that I will see each week. In terms of lesson planning, it is nice because I only have to do about 5 different lessons a week for all of the classes. However, I think it will be kind of boring teaching the same lesson 8-15 different times each week.
Classes went pretty well. Korean classes are 100 times crazier than American ones. No raising of the hands...students just call out. I had the students pick English names today. I gave them a list of normal and funny ones to choose from if they wanted. Here are my favorites so far: Obama, Clinton, Indian Jones, Bin, Homer, Simpson (these 2 boys sat next to each other), Pancake, Homework, Evita and Maple. It was only day 1, so I'll be sure to add any other awesome English names I encounter. Another strange and kind of awesome thing about teaching here is having all of my students bow to me. I'm thinking about trying this out on my American students when I come home, but I'm not sure that it will go over too well. I also enjoy that every single student I pass yells "hi!" to me in English. I'm a mini celebrity right now, although I think that will probably wear off after a while.


Tonight I had my first faculty dinner. The highlight of my dinner (if you could call it a highlight) was when I asked my co-teacher what one of the appetizer dishes was that I was eating. Her response: "Chicken ass". I immediately burst out laughing because that was not the answer I was expecting...plus hearing this cute little Korean woman say "ass" was pretty funny. I figured there had to be some sort of miscommunication, so I made her use her cell phone dictionary to see what the correct translation was. She looked up the Korean word and guess what it said....ass. I ate chicken ass for dinner. The worst part is that I don't think it was actually ass, since chicken's don't really have asses. I'm pretty sure they meant anus. Mmmmm....delicious.