Brittany Jefferson

My first birthday in Korea was pretty nice!  The actual day of my birthday, I went to school because I really didn’t see any point of taking a sick day to just sit in the house.  It was my easy day at work, with only 2 classes before lunch.

Let me backtrack a little bit first to tell you about the weekend before my birthday… I received my first birthday gift, which was a nice leather jacket, scarf and card in English!  I was pretty excited about this gift, so I wore the scarf to work on my actual birthday.

Now back to the actual day of my birthday… my co-teacher gave me a gift.  I also had my classes sing happy birthday to me… here’s the video!  I wish it was better quality but I took the video with my phone!  Anyway, watch the vid… and note that this class is one of my most active third grade classes…

My co-teacher also surprised me with a cake after lunch, and then she and my other co-teachers sang happy birthday to me and gave me a cute little card.  I have to add that the cake was POPPIN! Korea has the best sweets ever! LOL!  I don’t mean to sound hungry but this cake had kiwi and oranges and other fruit all on top.  The inside was white cake and all yummy!

So my birthday was pretty good!  I’m excited about fall break, holidays, and winter vacation coming up!

Today there is supposed to be a really big typhoon coming through Korea. Apparently, Typhoon Bolaven tore through Okinawa, Japan this past weekend. The pictures of the destruction make the storm look pretty scary, but it’s Wednesday evening and it has yet to be a real storm.
The principal of my elementary school decided it was too dangerous for the students to come to school, but not the teachers. We reported to school this morning at 9 o’clock ready to just sit there and hope that the storm didn’t get bad! I still don’t understand why they think it is ok for teachers to come to work in a big storm, but I have just come to the conclusion that I will not understand how things work here sometimes.

When they said “biggest typhoon we have seen in a long time”, I thought I was going to see trees blowing everywhere, horrible rain, and buildings shaking. This storm is actually pretty BORING!
What’s kinda crazy is the fact that they’re having a hurricane in America right now!

I’ll update y’all once the storm is over… we are supposed to get the worse tonight and in the morning, but I’m OK now so no worries!

So this is the first week of the new semester… and I haven’t done much work!  I guess I should kinda explain how the Korean school system works (or what I understand about it).  August is the start of the second semester and summer camp is for a month before.  I actually started at this school a week before summer camp started.  So during my first week, I was basically saying “Have a good summer break!” because it was the kids last week of the semester.

Teaching summer camp wasn’t that bad.  It was extra nice to have a week vacation right when I started working.  My week of teaching summer camp was pretty cool.  I got to get to know some of the kids a little better and get the hang of teaching in the public school.  I realized PowerPoints and activities are the way to go.  I also realized that the kids are all on VERY different English levels.

So back to what I’m doing during my first week of school… I’m deskwarming A LOT!  For those of you that don’t know… Deskwarming is the act of just sitting there and looking like you’re doing some work or not looking like you’re doing work.  I have figured out how to make PowerPoints and watch a whole TV series at the same time.  So I’m being pretty productive, I think.  Sometime during my deskwarming, they told me that I have to prepare for an open class that is in two weeks.  It’s not too bad because my co-teacher wants everything to be perfect so she has pretty much planned everything.

Well this is what my week is looking like!  I’ll probably have much more to post about in the up and coming weeks about my co-teacher, monsoon season, fall weather and other stuff.

Over and out!

This blog is for my family, friends and everyone in between… to let y’all know how it is to be in Korea and what I’m up to.  I will try to include as many videos and pictures as I possibly can so that you can see everything too!

And I know you’re probably wondering why I didn’t start this earlier.  I don’t have any actual reasoning other than pure laziness.  But now that I’ve started, I plan to keep it updated.  Just remember that I write the same way that I talk and my favorite subject in school was Math, not English.  It’s just a wonder that I’m an English teacher!  Don’t judge my writing abilities… essays were never my strong point LOL!

Regardless, I hope you enjoy… You’ll be sure to see my personality and I’m sure you’ll love it