The 2013-2014 School Year Has Begun

As instituted by my mother, it is our family tradition to take photos on our first day of school.   

Here is big E on his first day with Miss Patti: 

Look how much he has grown since his first day of school pic last year: 

Isn't it incredible how much he has changed?! 

Check out that handsome math teacher on the left.  What a guy! 

And, lastly, here is a sweet picture of E napping on his big boy cot at Miss Patti's.  This little man just melts my heart. 

Flash Mob!

Tom and I were a part of a flash mob! In the middle of our school's pep rally "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice came on and we performed a dance for our students.  Tom and I hid in the back and giggled as we messed up most of the moves! We had a great time. Go Knights!

Math-letics

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of sponsoring 7 of our GSIS math students at a math competition at another international school in Seoul.  I was really proud of the students that went because they all worked hard throughout the competition.  The day started with each student taking an individual test (roughly 150-200 kids came) at one of three levels (all of our students were in the middle level).  

Some of the other school's students were not as committed to the competition...

After the individual test each school took part in a team test where the whole school submitted one answer sheet for a 32 question test.  This test was freaking hard.  Here are some of our kids working at it.

After that it was time for a mental break with a pizza and ice cream lunch.

The final session of the day took our top four competitors to a "school bowl" and the other three took part in a partner test (which took place outside on this beautiful fall day).

Though our group was by far the smallest contingent our students worked really hard and even won some awards.  One student placed 3rd in the intermediate level individual test. And our top four took second place in the intermediate level "school bowl."  Also I won a raffle for a 20000won ($20) Starbucks gift card and a book about code writing.  It was good day and like I said before I was really proud of their efforts.

First Day of School

As is tradition, here is my picture on the first day of school!  I also had to get a picture of me and the little man, since he got to come to school with us. 

Everett had a full day of being at the ELC (daycare) and he did great.  I got to check on him a few times and he was either sleeping or sitting peacefully with the other babies.  The ELC provides a daily report on how he did--it's so cute!  His report said, "Today I was happy and quiet.  Today I enjoyed sitting on the bouncer and looking around." 

 I don't think I'll put his daily report on the fridge every day, but this first one is a keeper!  I'm so proud of our little guy.  I, personally, had a great day too.  It was super fun to see my students and be in the classroom again.  Honestly, today exceeded my expectations all around.  Here's to a new year!

PS--Although I'm more positive now, yesterday was rough! I definitely had a mommy breakdown about taking him to daycare.  I hear that's normal. :-)

Everett meets GSIS

Since Tom has been back at work this week and I'm still enjoying my maternity leave with Everett, I decided to take Everett up to school a few times to meet our friends and our students.  It has been such a blast to introduce him to our community here! 

These first two pictures are Everett at lunch:

 

Everett with Ms. Becki: 

Tom showing off Everett to his classes (that is one proud daddy!):

 If you look closely you can see the students busted out their phones to take pictures of him.  How funny is that?!

First day of school

It was requested by my wife and her mother that I take a "first day of school" picture for posterity's sake. Seeing as it is 6AM and I am jet lagged I wasn't very patient with the process but I did come through. It is pretty weird having a first day of school without Bonnie here. Only about 3 weeks left until we meet again but who's counting...

There's a first time for everything

Thursday we celebrated our school's first graduating class. It was a pretty awesome experience because Bonnie and I (and the rest of our great staff) have been working with these kids for the past three years to get them to this point. I taught over a third of the senior class math and many of those kids I had for the past 3 years.

The kids and their parents took a pretty big risk coming to our school since we had no product to offer other than that of our sister school which planted GSIS. It was great to get to celebrate their accomplishments and successes. We have students headed to some quality universities in the states. A couple examples: Ohio State, UC Berkley, Wash U (STL), Cornell, Rice, Northwestern, and many more.

Here are some sights from the big day. Graduation was supposed to be outside but the threat of rain moved it into the gym. It was still a good set up though.

The graduates:

A special musical performance by our music teacher:

The happy parents snapping pictures:

The graduates lining the stairs up to the school after the ceremony:

Peter K gave Bonnie those flowers as a thank you:

Jessice Wendy Won Young Park (long story) one of my outstanding math students:

Peter C. We both got to teach Peter for the past 3 years.

Allen, one the the senior starters for our basketball team:

Jennifer who went to Nepal with us twice, Bonnie coached her for 3 years, and she was a student of mine:

A couple picks of us trying to look nice together.

I really can't express accurately how awesome it was to get to be a part of this and see our hard work over the past 3 years pay off in a tangible way.

brownies!

The GIN (Global Issues Network) club that I sponsor had our last meeting of the school year this past week, so I decided to make some brownies to celebrate a successful year.  In general, Korean cuisine is not as sweet as it is in America so boxes of brownie or cake mix are not readily available in stores.  As a result, every time I go to the States I make sure to buy a few boxes of Betty Crocker Brownie Mix so I can make a quick dessert for special celebrations, like our last GIN meeting.

Since the end of the school year is so busy only a handful of our GIN boys came to the meeting:

And they demolished the brownies!  However, one of the boys seemed reluctant to take a tasty brownie treat and when I specifically asked him if he wanted one he said, "I don't know. I've never had a brownie before."

Me: "WHAT?!! You've NEVER had a brownie????"
Student: "I don't really like sweet things."
Me: "Well, this box of brownie goodness came straight from America so please try your first ever American Brownie."
Student: "Okay...I'll try one...."

Student: "Mrs. Meyer, this is the best brownie I've ever had!"

Thank you Betty Crocker.

Wrapping Up

We have about 2.5 weeks left in the school year and that means things are starting to get wrapped up. I had my last grad school class this past weekend and will "graduate" on June 12th. That means I will get most of my weekends back next year! I say "graduate" because I won't actually be in attendance. Bonnie is in a wedding on June 4th in Columbia, MO and I am a leaving early with her since she will be at 32 weeks at that point in time. There was no way I was going to have my pregnant wife make a 24 hours journey on her own.

All that I have left for grad school is one 6-ish page paper for the class I just finished and my defense of my project document (similar to a thesis). My defense will be done via ooVoo (similar to skype) since I will be back in the US. I just sent what I think is my completed project document to my supervising professor. It ended up being 68 pages, 15900 words, 84, 622 characters, and 98,583 characters with spaces. I have never in my life put together anything remotely close to that big.

If I have learned one thing from this project document experience it is that I have no desire to write a book. I can't wait to be officially done!

High School Retreat 2011

This past weekend Bonnie and I traveled to a camp about 3 hours drive from our home with 90 high school students for our annual high school retreat. It was a great time as it always is. Here are some photos of the highlights:

All of our kids in the auditorium gearing up for our first chapel.

Throughout our time there we got to take part in a handful of leisure activities. Our group's first activity was the ropes course/zip line. Bonnie took pics while I participated.
One of our students on the course.

Then our group went on a bike ride and Bonnie and I opted out (pregnancy and all) and decided to take in the scenery.
Our bike riders crossing the bridge.
Nature!
Though there weren't any good pictures to capture it, our Saturday night was spent enjoying an entertaining talent show and a warm and cozy bonfire. The next morning our group had some team building exercises.
Some stretches and jumping jacks to warm up.
This was a tough one. I think you can see the golf ball rolling down the chute.

It was a great time and though it was tiring I think our kids really enjoyed it. I know we did. I 'll leave you with a couple picks of our students enjoying their time.

learning from 6000 miles

As I've talked about before I am currently taking graduate courses to get my Masters in Education. I am in my last semester of course work and only have 2 classes left. The program is run through Simpson University in Redding, California. The school flies a teacher out here for two weekends in-a-row. We meet Friday night and Saturday 4 times and that makes one course. It has been very convenient for me because classes meet at our school.

For the class that I just started today we had a last minute change in instructor. The school was trying to hire an international teacher from within Korea to teach this course but they ran into some complications with the paperwork so they had to scrap those plans. Instead we are having a teacher in Redding teach us over polycom (think Skype but a little more advanced). It is actually going really well and I don't feel like it is changing the learning process too much. Here is a photo of the set up.

Another one down

Yesterday Bonnie and I wrapped up our third season as basketball coaches here at GSIS. It was a rough year for both programs because our school passed the 300 student limit required to stay in the lower division of our athletic conference. This meant that we had to step up and play with the big boys and girls in Division one. Though the caliber of play from most schools (one of the military base schools is really good) still didn't match that of a normal US high school basketball team, it was still a big jump for our students.

Bonnie's girls team went from winning the Division 2 tournament last year to placing 9th (last) in Division 1 this year even though she returned all of her players. I like I said, it was a big jump. The highlight of her season was in the final regular season game when the team got their first (and only) victory of the season. It was tough for her and the girls to go from the mountain top to the valley.

The boys team proved itself to be a little more competitive and placed 7th in the conference tournament. To sum up a crazy tournament we played 4 games in 2 days, one went into overtime and our final game went into double overtime. Our two senior boys got to go out in dramatic fashion with that double OT game to take 7th place.

We enjoyed our time coaching but we are eagerly anticipating the extra free time that will be coming our way now that the season is over.

students

A few weeks ago we had spirit week at our school.  One of the spirit days was "animal day."  Here's Korea's version of incorporating animal-ness into their wardrobe. 

 The kangaroo suit is a pajama outfit, which I found to be pretty funny!

One of the students from the GIN (Global Issues Network) club that help sponsor hosted a UNICEF week at our school.  She had posters around school raising awareness about UNICEF and set up a booth at lunch (see below) to sell merchandise with all the proceeds going to UNICEF.  She initiated and organized this all by herself.    Very impressive! 

I've rarely put pictures up of my classroom in action, so here's a few pictures of my US History class.  (Have no fear, I asked them if I could put their pictures on my blog).