Downhill from here

March 1. Wow. Less than six months now until the end of my contract in Korea. I have mixed feelings about it. My two amazing friends who came to visit us for two weeks got on a plane this morning and headed back to Chicago. I was pretty jealous that they got to do that. The thought of seeing the Chicago landscape below as we land at O'Hare makes me giddy. I can hardly wait for it. At the same time, I am aware that I may never come back to Korea and that every moment here should be treated as precious. It's hard to feel tugged in so many directions.

Tomorrow the new semester starts. After six weeks of vacation, I am hardly prepared for it. This semester is going to be a whole new ball of wax. New classes, new students, new co-workers. I found out that I will be teaching 2nd grade (sophomore age) conversation classes, a writing class, and a new type of class that the school is trying out--video classes. In other words, I'll be sitting in a room at my school and teaching a class to a bunch of students who are at another high school. Skype-teaching, basically. This is a whole new realm for me. I also found out that I will have no co-teacher at all this semester. While I'm excited for the freedom this will allow me in planning my classes, I appreciated the support and guidance of my co-teacher last semester. We shall see. Last but not least, I'll be teaching a gifted class again. This time I got to choose the texts, and I chose The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie. I'll only actually be teaching TMC, since I won't be around for the second semester. Some other teacher will have to deal with the awesomeness of my book choice. :) I'm super excited to teach TMC--it's one of my favorite books of all time, and I'm interested to see how the kids react to sci-fi.

And so the second half of our adventure begins. Joe and I still feel conflicting things about Korea--I'm not sure if we've entered into the acceptance phase yet of culture shock, but I do think we've explored a lot of this country, together and with our friends. We've seen some things that have given us a better grasp of the country, and other things that continue to baffle us. We are excited for the next few months . . . for the things we'll continue to learn here, and for our nearing return to Chicago and all our friends and family.