Day 333: My School Is Cool

This morning was pretty fun. It was Class Photos Day at POLY, and the Parrots were the first up to get photographed. All my kids came dressed up today in nice blank pants and skirts and white shirts, and then we put them in these little mini graduation gowns and caps. Then Cecilia and I stood up next to them on the stage in the library and smiled for the camera. We had what seemed like a million photos of us taken together, and I hope that at least one of them turns out great! (and I hope that I get a copy of this photo too! It'll make for a great memory of my time with the Parrots.)

Little things like this make me realize how cool my school really is. The vast majority of hagwons in Korea don't ever do stuff like this. We get to have Class Photo Day, birthday parties, field trips, Halloween parties and Christmas concerts, all the kids get personalized photo albums when they graduate, we have reading and speaking contests, we have extra tutoring to help the slower students, we get to do all the regular learning school stuff plus gym and computers class, we have a real library full of books that the kids can borrow, we have a school counsellor to help with all the learning and behaviour issues that come up... How awesome is my school!

POLY may work us to the bone but they're such a great place to work. I feel like I'm doing real, actual teaching here with these kids. Most hagwans in Korea you're just "edutating" where neither the teachers nor the management care about the kids' education and just care about the money, but at my job I know the kids are actually learning something from an organized curriculam based on long-term educational planning. I don't mind the work, really, when I see the progress all my kids make. And all those little extras show they really care about the kids too. Pretty cool for an instituation that's actually a business, and not a regular public school or anything!