::A Geek in Korea::

Summer has officially “arrived”. Today we went to work cleaning the air filters on the air conditioner and getting some ice cream bars from the store. The dog got a wash, but he’s got a week left before he gets trimmed down again to prevent overheating. We move the fans around in rooms that don’t have air conditioning, and when we go outside we bring water bottles if we plan to walk far. The rainy season has also officially started. That’s the worst part of a brutal summer, the awful humidity that makes the heat more oppressive.

Next week the students have their summer vacation, which is an excuse for their parents to enroll them into several different tutoring programs to eat up all their free time. Luckily for us, the “summer intensive” period is different than the normal program I’m used to that starts extremely early and may or may not use different books. Every summer intensive class is assigned a book to finish separate from it’s normal material. One teacher is assigned to each class. The teacher handles the classes each day for the entire class period. The school will be adding only two hours to my schedule in the morning, then actually scheduling a time where it would be feasible to eat lunch before the afternoon classes start.

While the logistics make sense, the parents hate this scheduling. The students ride on the bus to get to school, study in the morning, then get back on the bus to go home for lunch. Then, they are bused back to school as usual for their afternoon classes too. There is no lunch  delivery program or kitchen at the school. There is also no babysitting or day care option to keep the kids through the whole day. Trying to set up a logistical way to feed and entertain students for several hours while they wait to go home after their afternoon classes other classes are in progress without more teachers is impossible. It must be this way for everyone’s sanity. If they change this summer intensive will be torture.

The parents are upset that the school isn’t offering some sort of lunch program to allow the kids to skip the extra hour of commuting. I’m sure if there was a program to let the students sleep, eat, and live at the school, parents would sign up for that too. If it was cheaper to send students abroad, they’d be gone. The general rule seems to be “If my child has an hour of free time, I’m against that. If that hour of free time could be spent with parents, it must be stopped at all cost.”