A little about work and my schedule

Interestingly enough, I am sitting at work right now, a class just cancelled so I thought I would use the opportunity to tell you all a little about my job. I work for a haegwon, or private school, called English Country School (ECS for short). My schedule is rather absurd, but it fits in with the culture of Korea, and is fairly typical of haegwon life.
Most businesses stay open very late here, generally closing around midnight for your average biz, such as hair salon or corner grocery store, but the internet cafes are 24 hours, the norebangs and restaurants and bars all close about 6 am... well most of them close at that time, some never close, but quite a few businesses end up shutting down from 6am til noon. Every time I've gone to the PC bang to call home, I end up leaving around 3 or 4 am and all of the tables outside the restaurants are still full. But I digress...
I generally wake up around ten am just enough time to wake up and brush my teeth before I walk down to Hapkido, a Korean martial art, which lasts from 11 til noon. I head home, shower, cook lunch and head to work around 1:40pm... just enough time to walk to school and get there around 2pm or shortly thereafter. My day really begins at 2:30 when all my little rugrats show up. My first classes are younger students, my students range from 7 -16 years old. Korean age is slightly different, you are born at 1 years old and every lunar new year you have a birthday, so the entire country celebrates their birthday on the same day every year! But it also means that depending on when you were born, by the time lunar new year rolls around, if you were born in December, come January/February, you could be two years old! LOL So that was the roundabout way of saying they are all younger than you think.
My day is basically split into two halves: classes before 7pm and those after 7pm. 2:30-7p are my students in younger elementary grades, most between 7 and 12. The students after 7p are all TOEFL students, working for a purpose: to get into good high schools and eventually good universities. Classes last 45 minutes and after each class you get a 5 minute break to catch your breath, find your next book and head on to the next one. Every class has a different dynamic and they are always shuffling our schedules around. One week may be with these classes and next a completely different schedule. My classes are rather small, which is ideal for learning a new language, and not one of mine is over 13 students. My biggest class, which is also one of my faves is on Tuesday/Thursday and if I'm not in the room when the bell rings, 4 or 5 of them come into the teacher's room and literally drag me out ready or not! It's kind of nice to be that adored, but don't get me wrong... there are quite a few that don't like me either. It isn't cheap to send students to these haegwons, in fact, statistics say that parents are willing to spend up to 30% of their gross income on their child's education. Alot of kids don't want to be here and studying and most of their are overworked and sleep deprived, but again, that's a cultural thing. I love being able to see the effects of my work. Its taken awhile and with some of the attitudes, I actually wondered if we did anything here but I am finally seeing that some of the things I've taught have sunk in at least a bit. The students here are masters of memorization so you almost have to trick them to see if they've learned the material. As much fun as I have with the younger students, I prefer teaching the older middle schoolers because they can have complete conversations and understand much better, flip side is that they are much lazier, but it is all a bunch of give and take. Anyway, back to teaching.

The Amazing Race will be explained in full with pictures... really, I'm not lying, however after I post the next batch I will be out of pics for awhile since I broke (read: got sand stuck in the lens) my camera at Boryeong Mud Festival 2008... see a trend in this post? More and more things to write about... can I please have the internet in my house!?!?! Anyway, on a bright note... tomorrow is citizen day! I get my passport and my alien registration card! WOO HOO!!!