It's a camp life

One of the aspects of the job that I found interesting and beneficial when I looking into working here in Korea was the idea of English Camp. Back in Canada kids go off to Bible Camp, Band Camp or perhaps just simply Summer Camp, but here in Korea students are sent to English Camp to get a little more exposure to the language. The thing that interested me in this was that I would get paid extra money to work such camps.

Yay!

So I spent last week at my first English Camp for Middle School students. Overall I had a good time.

There were 9 foreign teachers and 9 Korean teachers in addition to a few other support staff. All told there about 140 students.

Camp ran from Monday to Friday with teaching only happening on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Each of us foreign teachers were given a class on the first day and we went through some ice-breakers and some team building exercises before the actual classes began on Tuesday. I was teaching sports, which had me focusing on verbs and having the students playing soccer-baseball. It was a fun class.

Camp itself was good. The food was good, the students and my fellow teachers were a lot of fun. One teacher brought his Wii gaming console with him so a bunch of us got to play that. I played Settlers of Catan for the first time (a great board game) and was introduced to The Venture Brothers (a very funny cartoon).

Perhaps the only noteworthy thing to happen during my camp was New Years. Camp ran from December 29, 2008 to January 2, 2009 and we weren't allowed to leave the camp, so New Years was spent amongst our small group, but it was good. We had champagne, pizza, fireworks, sparklers and even a remote control helicopter.

All in all it was a rather simple and fun way to make an extra $800. I wish that I had gotten to work more than one week, but there was some heavy competition for spots and those with the most seniority got the first choice. Making the decision to go again will be simple.

Just a few of the students from camp