Let’s lay it out clearly here, teaching in schools where I don’t speak the primary language in an interesting experience.

Here’s a little bit of a role-play thought for you…

You’ve started at a new school. Congratulations! As with any new job, one of your first tasks is to discover all the inner workings of the school from things like who the staff members are and how you address them, where to go for questions about HR and pay; right down to simple stuff like how to work the photocopier, where the bathroom and the cafeteria are, where you get supplies like pens and paperclips.

Now add to this the fact you are teaching subject that is new to you, one which you don’t have any experience of, you don’t have a teaching outline for the year because there isn’t one, and you have exactly 1 day to figure it all out – what type of thing to teach and at what level you are aiming – and get your outline ready so that you can start planning lessons.   And you must multiply this experience by 3, because you are teaching at 3 separate schools, all of them completely different from each other.

Not only this, but you have to navigate the technology you have been given and it looks a bit….

Because don’t forget, you are attempting to do all of these things IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.

My point here being, that everything right now is busy, and tiring, and draining, because not only am I starting from scratch; but I’m being expected to do this in really short timescales while navigating a language and customs foreign to my own.

Every day, right now, is hard work.

There are not enough hours in the day.

I not only work during the day, but then have to try and continue prepping for part of the evenings and weekends while also trying to at least take a little time to rest and relax.

It’s tough.

But I still like being here.

I like my students.

I still want to be here and do well.

There are other slightly less stressful differences between teaching here and at home as well.

For a start, I get distracted much less than teaching at home. Because I am not conversational in Korean, I don’t get side-tracked by office conversations. It means there’s no-one to chin wag with. No-one to share sweets with and grab a tea. No-one’s desk to deface with Twilight paraphernalia. No-one to shoot peashooter guns with. No-one to laugh or commiserate with.

All this generally means that when I’m at work, I work. Which you might be thinking ‘well, that’s kind of the point’, but it also means that I literally never step away from my desk except to teach and therefore by the end of the day I am 100% mentally drained from being constantly focused.   

Having said that, I do really like the teachers I work with and appreciate that they try their best to include me by just saying a couple words in English or putting up with me saying 1 or 2 words in Korean to them every day and making sure that we always go to lunch together. My boss and my co-teacher have been really amazingly helpful and wonderful helping me get set up in my new home (more on that later), and I was also invited out to our team work dinner a couple weeks back as well (again, details later).

It might be a terrible thing to say, but I think that possibly one of the best things in my life right now is my school lunch. I might have to steal a Korean lunch lady to take home with me to employ her to cook my food. Every day I get to eat lunch at whichever school I am at, and they all are delicious. Each meal has rice, a soup of some kind, a meat portion, vegetables (usually a type of kimchi), and a dessert or drink. My school lunch actually ends up being my main meal of the day, with my dinner at home taking a backseat. And in case you think I am making up the wonderfulness that is a Korean school lunch…

Also, in case you’re wondering, this is what my desk looks like…

And yes, it is true that when you get to school you change out of your outdoor shoes and into indoor shoes (in my case, grey crocs).

As I walk around the school, the students bow and greet me (they do this to all teachers) and likewise so do the other staff. I spend a lot of my day bowing and saying hello and goodbye.

The students are responsible for keeping the classrooms and the hallways clean, and have little cupboards outside the classrooms for their brooms and cleaning stuff.

Overall, the level of independence of the students is far higher here, I think, than in the UK. For example, I see young kids (both elementary and middle school age) wandering around the city where I live on their own, some of them as late as 9 or 10pm at night (going home from studying at academies). No-one bats an eyelid at this, but it certainly wouldn’t happen at home. In some ways the kids here are expected to be more responsible for themselves; having said that, in some ways they also seem younger and more naïve (or less tough, maybe) than children in the UK.

And also, yes, teachers and students do brush their teeth after lunch.

Oh, and there are bells that ring in the school every time a lesson starts or ends. Very handy.

Also, there seem to be a lot of snacks going round the schools. It seems like every day I come in to my desk and find some type of fruit, cake, drink, vitamin gummies, or something else that has been bought by a member of staff. I’m keeping up my end though – the people at Paris Baguette love me emptying their shelves of cookies, Madeline cakes, and doughnuts.   

And I guess that’s about it for school life.

Next time, final catch up…general life!