We are 6.5 hours into a 13 hour flight. I think we just crossed the date line, we are over the Bearing Sea north of Vladivostok. My butt is sore from this damn seat, despite sitting on 2 pillows and Abi has exhausted all of her playthings. FML! Since I've watched Age of Ultron and Insurgent both start to finish , had a quick nap, and nothing else looks interesting, I'll take this opportunity to tell everyone about our new school, the Korean International School, Jeju campus in Seogwipo-si. Home of the Dragons.
The school was started soon after the Korean War cease fire to teach English mainly to South Korean Kids. The country was ready to join the rest of the modern world, while its sister to the North was turning its back on it. The original school is in Seoul I think and our campus is much newer. It is an all inclusive school covering nursery school thru 12 th grade. American style curriculum, with AP classes offered. Most of the students are South Korean, with some from neighboring Japan, China, And others. Over 60% of the faculty are American, and all classes, except foreign languages are taught in English. Our principal and her husband were the ones who opened the school on Jeju, and the high school was only recently opened. I believe this year will mark the first graduating class who hadve attended all grades there, but I could be off by a year or two.
The school is a boarding school, so a large portion of elementary and middle school students live in dorms, and almost 95% of high school students. I've been told that the younger grades are mostly transient. High English scores are required to gain entrance to many prestigious Korean High Schools and Universities, so students are enrolled, get the Dnglish scores required, and then transfer elsewhere. The Older students are a different story. There you have students who are set to enter an Ivy League School in the states. They are there for the long haul, getting the advanced classes to make them competitive, and succeeding very well. KIS alumni have an obscenely high enrollment rate to Ivy League schools, like Princeton, MIT, and Harvard.
The students attend regular classes all day and the. Have "tutoring" for several hours in the evening. There they study, do homework, tutor others, or take extra classes. This is the way of Koreaneducation, and is viewed as quite normal. There are also a plethora of clubs, bands ( several rock bands I've been told) and state of the art sports complexes on campus. However sports are viewed quite differently. We've heard stories about students skipping practice and games because they had to *gasp* study for a test! The horror! Guess they actually value education over a sport.... Go figure.
Each class has a trip right around spring break. The younger kids stay on the island, middle grades head to the mainland. The freshmen, and sophomores go to either Nepal or Vietnam to do humanitarian work like building wells, and schools. We will have an opportunity to chaperone if we like. Juniors head to Washington DC to meet with college recruiters. Like I said, U.S. Ivy League is the goal.
The school also built apartments for faculty with families, called the KIS Village, which is where we will live, less than 1 mile from campus. Abi will attend day care at first, and then be enrolled in the nursery school, both on campus with us. We will all be picked up at the village and taken to campus each morning, where we can walk Abi to her program, and then walk to our rooms. I think Jessi is really looking forward to that part.
School runs on a block schedule. 8 90 minute classes, 4 a day. Jessi and I will teach 4 of 8 periods, have 2 - 3 planning periods, and the rest will be set collaboration time. All classrooms from kindergarten - 5th have a class set of IPads. All students 5th - 12th have their own MacBooks, and so will we. Technology is fully integrated into the classroom setting.
So... Any questions? Leave them in the comments section.
We are well over Russia now. We have 3 nights in Seoul when we land to explore and get our bearings ( I hope). Hopefully Abi sleeps, lol. After that we hop a flight to Jeju, where someone will pick us up at the airport and take us to our next hotel near Seogwipo for 2 more nights. We can finally get into our apartment on the 23rd. Hopefully we have a little time to explore the little city. We get 2 nights to get settled and then we start orientation. They will take us to the consulate to get our alien registration cards ( we're aliens now!), to the hospital to get out health checkup and start our insurance coverage, to the bank to set up our Korean bank accounts, and then promptly deposit 2,000,000 won ( a little less than $2,000) each as move in money. Then a few days of technology training and school policy stuff and we get to plan in our rooms.
It's all real now. Hopefully Abi and Jessi will sleep a bit for the next 6 hours before we land. Yeah.....right....
See you next time. I should have lots of pics of the city and the island by then.
We're landing.....
No comments:
Post a Comment