Playing Catch-up

A few things of note over the last few months:

End of May/Beginning of June:  Got food poisoning. Badly. 

Was hospitalized for four days and nights. Still paying back the loan I took from my boss to pay for that bad boy. I was told the offending bacteria was campylobacter, usually associated with chicken. Funny thing is, I hadn't had chicken at all for several days. I think the culprit came from a food cart at which I'd eaten some kimbap earlier that week. Never. Again.  No more street food.

 End of July:  The Great Kitten Drama 

Nearby my apartment building is a completely empty entire city block wrapped in green tarp fencing, into which people throw their trash. Inside, stray cats have made their home. 

One night coming home from work I heard the plaintive and unmistakable mewings of a tiny kitten. Long story short, the mama cat deposited one of her two kittens outside my building's steps. I took the kitten in for a few hours and let her cool off with some water. This was during the height of the serious heat wave, mind you. Later I put her back outside in a cooler area and found her sibling, so I placed them together. I felt like a monster doing this, but I had to go to work and couldn't leave them in my apartment for eight hours. 

When I returned that evening, they were still there, so I brought them inside overnight. I named them Maggie (the orange calico) and Hazel (the black and tan one). Maggie I named for St. Mary Magdalene, since it was on her feast day that the mama cat had brought her to me.

A good friend here helped me bring the kittens to a wonderful vet clinic the next day. This place helps stray animals and puts them up for adoption. About three weeks later, they texted me to say Maggie had been adopted. Yay! 

To my knowledge, Hazel still needs a home. Would that I could take her! But for many reasons, I cannot. My heart aches for little Hazel and I pray she can be adopted soon.

This entire 48-hour saga did a number on my nervous system, but thankfully, I had booked a couple nights at the beach for our three-day "summer vacation." As always, being in salt water and lying on the sand did wonders for me.

August: more heat and an awkward realization

I went to a fabulous cafe by the sea this month, and I enjoyed a night market in Ulsan Grand Park even in the steamy rain. I also successfully ordered food delivery with one of the ubiquitous apps you need to even breathe around here. I felt mighty accomplished to have tangsuyuk delivered to my apartment.

But also this month, I was made aware at work that all this time I was supposed to be teaching one book per semester at the academy. In other words, I was spending too much time making sure the students knew the material before moving on to the next unit. 

So, I have had to course correct against the tide of my own teaching experience and philosophy. It has not been easy. I need to rush through the books so that parents are happy to see their children "finishing" a book. Yet the students don't understand half of what I'm trying to teach. They complete grammar patterns without understanding them, we gloss over vocabulary that they are asking about (and which they should probably know), and we are just pushing them along to the next semester. 

This has challenged me to be creative within the tight confines of one book-one semester (and I'm talking workbooks here, not readers). So be it. I don't really have a choice, do I? Today is the start of the fall semester, so now we shall see how this works out.  

I'm confident that even with this tight restriction, I will be able to give my students something of worth both personally and professionally. God help me!