full swing

I started teaching my beginner classes this week and I started taking Korean classes last night, too, so I'm getting busier. The beginner students are freshmen who are required to take English, but have only taken Japanese in high school, so they start from the beginning here at college. They take 8 hours of conversation a week and then some grammar classes, too, so their first year of college is full of a flood of English. It's strange to be teaching college students the basics, since in Korea I taught these same things to 5 and 6 year olds, but I think our freshmen will learn quickly. Most of them are very eager.

My Korean class is at night, and is full of university students, mostly from the other university in Yanji. I was the first student in the classroom, and that really confused the other students who came in after me. They saw me there and they thought they had the wrong classroom, because they assumed the white girl would be the teacher and she obviously wouldn't speak Korean. But, they checked the room number and started filtering in. When they heard my first response in Korean to the teacher, they sorta laughed and murmured some things softly. The class was much easier than my classes in Seoul, so I'm thinking about moving up a level, but I might just stay because the next level is the highest one. The good thing was that even though I knew all the words, it was good to practice and think in Korean again. Maybe being at a lower level will increase my conversational ability.