The Deal with Winter Camp and Desk Warming

Winter Camp Winter English Camp is a camp during winter vacation that most public school teachers are required to teach.  Depending on your school, it can range from a few days to a few weeks.  During the rest of the school holiday, English public school teachers are still required to come in, even though there are no classes and no other teachers.  We affectionately call this time "Desk Warming." Winter Camp is entirely in the hands of the English teacher.  (Or, most are.)  I was the one who planned it and taught it.  It runs from 8:30-12:30, with the afternoons free for planning.  Mine was set up so that 9:00-9:40 was 1st/2nd grade for two weeks, and 9:50-12:10 was 3/4th grade for the first...

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Adaptibility, the good, the bad, and the pretty

Throughout high school, my class was told -- as every class should be -- that we were bright, capable, full of potential, and the future was not simply in our hands; it was us.  We were also told that we were special because we had grown up overseas and had a sense of the changing world, of cultural interactions, of adaptability.  Highly adaptable, they told us.  Highly adaptable from the moving, the transitioning, the juggling of culture and language and family and streams of friends passing through.  I've been thinking about adaptability lately, or rather, I've been thinking about what it often comes hand-in-hand with -- getting used to situations. "Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe...

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Ring out, wild bells

"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,    The flying cloud, the frosty light:    The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. " --Tennyson On New Year's Eve, one of Sweden's traditions is a Swedish reading of Tennyson's poem, In Memoriam, on national TV.  It's the ideal New Year poem; ringing bells to beckon in the good, flush out the bad, and give cause to hope. 2012 was an eventful year for me. I visited three new countries, moved to Korea, spent hours lost on busses and subways, made great friends, changed jobs, said goodbye to new friends, explored a foreign culture, got bruised from kickball, took on too many languages, ate jellyfish legs, learned yoga, got...

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