The End of the Beginning

Korean elementary schools take the month of January off as winter vacation. Private education administrators view this with dollar-signs for pupils (pun intended) and capitalize by expanding academy hours from the usual 2:15-7:25 to 9:15-7:25. Retract those astonished gasps, readers; teachers are allotted a generous hour for free cafeteria lunch!

The resulting workweek elicits a steady stream of stress which has built itself up over the first month of 2010, but the dam has finally broken and the unpleasantness is already washing out to sea. I finally have the time and energy to blog again! This explanation does nothing to justify the absence of a December post, for which I have no excuse. Life can be monotonous in any hemisphere, it seems.

A quick recap of the YBM Gaepo International Academy's Winter Intensive Courses:

From 9:15 to 10:40 I taught five bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first graders a reading and discussion class. The twins Jake and Ryan, identical in genes and wardrobe (but not indistinguishable- Jakes glasses are light blue, Ryan's dark blue) needed constant attention. Amy was so tiny and sweet and adorable I kept watching the door expecting Angelina Jolie to burst in and adopt her.

From 10:45 to 12:10 I taught nine third graders writing and discussion, most of which we spent crafting whimsical topic sentences and learning about the Hubble space telescope with the library computer projector. If they were half as interested in LIGHT ECHO as I was, it should have been pretty cool.

From 12:10 to 2:15 we had lunch and planning, then the regular class load. The first week was augmented with extra extra make-up classes to account for the first day snow day, the second week discombobulated by assessment tests that were not factored into lesson plans.

So it's been a trying, tiring month. But it's over now, and so is the blogging about it, which brings us, dear readers, to the "good stuff":

At about ten o'clock Christmas eve, I hopped off a scooter in front of HOSTEL NOMADS in Phnom Penh, tiptoed into the darkened bunk-room, laid out on the low, squishy mattress, and grinned to sleep in the warm Khmer night. Christmas morning I found Matilda, my rusty trusty 250cc Honda, ate a bowl of curry to suffocate the fear welling up in my stomach, bought a map of Cambodia and set off 300 km north for Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor. More to come.