My School and Apartment, Part I: My School

Hello, friends, family, former bosses, and... other people? Sorry I've been so lazy. I've finally reached a point in Final Fantasy II (for my iPod touch) where I decided that writing this entry might be more fun than dungeon crawling and trying to determine what to do next from disconnected plot events and frustratingly terse dialogue. So, let's get right to it.

My School

At the end of orientation, we were told the schools to which we were assigned; I was placed at Gongyeon Elementary School in northeast Seoul, where I teach mainly fifth and sixth graders.

In Korea, elementary school consists of grades one through six. English is part of the core curriculum, and EPIK is the government program that puts at least one native English speaker in every public school in the country.

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Ye olde, dusty hallway.

More dusty hallway action.

Like many schools in Korea, Gongyeon is old and dusty. The halls are cold in the winter and purportedly hot in the summer, because there is no building-wide central A/C. (Each room has its own individual unit, though, so temperature-induced discomfort is limited only to hallway travel.) Bathroom stalls mostly feature "squatters" (or what I like to call "floor urinals"); and there's only one, large roll of toilet paper available for the whole bathroom. You just have to take a whole wad of TP before you enter a stall and hope it's enough. Also, there was no running hot water until this year. It sounds like a dump, but it's a comfortable and lively dump.

The school consists of a large, (horizontally mirrored) L-shaped building with a shorter wing jutting out of the top of the "L." (Zoom in a few times in the map above to see what I mean.) This structure lines the perimeter of an expansive, dusty field, where kids play soccer during their breaks; indeed, the most likely cause of the school's dustiness. There is no cafeteria, so everyday, food is transported in carts from the kitchens to each class's homeroom classroom and dished out to students and teachers alike in metal trays. Lunches are healthy, yummy, and crazily cheap (more on this later).

Back.

Front.

The pictures to the right show the front and back entrances to the school, both located on the long, center portion of the complex. In the lefthand picture, you can see the Great Dusty Field and the shorter, west wing in the background. Everyone enters and exits school from the back.

Although the school lacks the feel and amenities of a modern building (many examples of which I mentioned earlier), the one thing on which it does not skimp is presentation-related technology in the classrooms. Every classroom is outfitted with a desktop workstation (albeit a fairly low-spec one) that is connected to a projector or large, flatscreen LCD TV. And in the "English Zone," the projector screen is a touch-screen that syncs with the desktop computer.

The "English Zone" is what they call a special classroom dedicated to studying English. With some exceptions, Korean students mostly stay in their homeroom classrooms, and the teachers are the ones who must move around between classes. Because one classroom is used for many subjects, a given subject teacher cannot dedicate the room (with subject-specific decor, for example) strictly to his or her needs. Therefore, many schools have an "English Zone," where students must go to for English class.

Here is the (by far) atypical classroom entrance to our English Zone:
The vestibule (yes, it has one; and yes, I just used the word "vestibule"):

And the inside:

Far more modern, fancy-pantsy, and colorful than traditional classrooms... but still very, very dusty.

So there you have it. A brief intro to my school. Coming soon is part two of my two-part series, "My School and Apartment, Part II: My Apartment." Now back to Final Fantasy II... I'm almost done with that trash.