NaBloPoMo: Day 16 "Goals: Addendum"

Ok, I don't have a lot of time, because Adam is sitting in the next room with wine and Agents of Shield cued up, just WAITING for me to come join him. And holding the wine hostage. >:(

I realized today that I left out a major section of my goals in my previous posts: Korean goals in Korea.

1. Create and design a middle school curriculum. There's a large project I'm working on with several other ESL teachers here in Gwangju to create a curriculum for middle school ESL teachers in our particular program, EPIK. A lot of new teachers (myself and Adam included) get thrown into middle schools with Korea co-teachers who hand us the middle school textbooks and say "You can use these if you want. Or not. Do you like them? I don't like them. You can just do whatever you think is helpful for the students..."  And after looking at the first couple pages of the available textbooks, I have to agree that they are the opposite of compelling for a middle school student. So, I (and most other middle school ESL teachers) attempt to do... whatever I feel is useful. This leads, inevitably, to unequal lesson quality throughout the middle schools of the city (and country). And this is what our determined little group wants to change.

We've been working diligently (usually) on the project for about a year, now, and we are a couple days away from finishing grade 1 of the curriculum (or, 7th grade). Exciting and daunting and time consuming, I'm personally committed to seeing this project through to completion before leaving. I have confidence it CAN be done, but after next month, we'll have (or won't have) assurance from the Gwangju Office of Education that they'll fund the remainder of the project, which will be (HOPEFULLY, CROSS EVERY FINGER AND TOE) a huge relief and motivating factor.

2. Lead a local theatre company. In the past 1.5 years, I've participated in two theater shows put on by the Gwangju Performance Project, which was started and run by other ESL teachers for the past 4-ish years. Next year, however, the entire leadership group is leaving Korea. They've decided they'd like yours truly to be the next GPP coordinator/leader/director, and so I'll be initiating and running the show (ha, literally) starting next March. This is much scarier than the textbook project, but also waaaayyy more exciting, in many ways. I've already got a play in mind for next spring, but I'll keep you posted.

3. Be proud of Adam. This isn't a goal, but I just want to brag a little on my husband. There's a local magazine here in Gwangju that has a pretty significant readership throughout the whole country. He started out volunteering to write articles here and there, and then was quickly promoted to the Online Editor. And now... there are rumors of bigger and better things in the works.

He's awesome. You can check out the online version of the magazine here!

AAHH! Adam's starting the show without meeeeeeeeee....

Carpe November!

P.S. Abs & squats, CHECK -- rest day!
Minimalism, CHECK. Another non-challenge day, another day of uploading pics and pics and pics to my online cloud.