I borrowed the following passage from Wikipedia.com to help describe what the holiday is all about. Our boss, James, refers to it as Korean Thanksgiving. It seems that that is an appropriate title to draw a comparison from.
Chuseok (Korean: 추석), originally known as Hangawee (한가위) (from archaic Korean for "great middle"), is a major harvest festival and a three-day holiday in Korea celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. Like many other harvest festivals, it is held around the Autumn Equinox. As a celebration of the good harvest, Koreans visit their ancestral hometowns and share a feast of Korean traditional food. One of the major foods prepared and eaten during the Chuseok holiday is songpyeon (송편), a crescent-shaped rice cake which is steamed upon pine needles. Other dishes commonly prepared are japchae, bulgogi and fruits.
All the kids in their traditional dress:
Liz Teacher's class with my class (Jasmine, Grace, Amy, Jina, and Aisha):
Grace and Jasmine in their hambuls.
My girls showing me the traditional reverent bow. If you've ever been Good Friday service at a Catholic church and cringed when you saw the priest just kind of drop to the ground, that's what it looked like!
My class combined with Jack Teacher's class for the day. Instead of having class, we participated in the creation of numerous traditional treats and games. We started with coloring Korean masks.
Grace and Jasmine coloring away:
From left to right: Michelle with her completed mask, the masks, Rachel with her completed mask. 
Then, we made ddakgi with old newspaper.
It is a game where you have two flat squares of paper. You leave one on the ground and you try to flip it with the other one by throwing it very hard against the one on the ground. Here's Jasmine trying:
Then we made jeagi chakis out of tissue paper and one coin. These are used like American hackey sack.
Evan showing the class how to do it:
Evan showing the class how to do it:
Then, we made songpyeon. You start with the rice cake dough in a ball as on the left. Then, you make them into a dish shape like Belle is doing in the middle. Then you fill them with ground soy and sugar, as on the right.
Then you push the ends up and together to seal the filling in.
Then you push the ends up and together to seal the filling in.
And they look like this:
Grace got pretty bored after a while.
... and ended with tug-o-war. This picture is of John Teacher vs. his whole class. He won.
It was a very fun, easy day. I had a blast participating a bit in this traditional Korean holiday! Liz, Dustin and I visited a temple with Irene, her daughter, and Susan and her family the next day (Friday). That will be the topic of my next post! I'm going to give you Tokyo in pieces after that, once I get all my pictures uploaded!
Grace got pretty bored after a while. Susan steamed them for us and we had them with lunch!
At the end of the day, we all went to the gym to play traditional Korean games. We started with an arm wrestling tournament...
... and ended with tug-o-war. This picture is of John Teacher vs. his whole class. He won.
It was a very fun, easy day. I had a blast participating a bit in this traditional Korean holiday! Liz, Dustin and I visited a temple with Irene, her daughter, and Susan and her family the next day (Friday). That will be the topic of my next post! I'm going to give you Tokyo in pieces after that, once I get all my pictures uploaded!
Happy Chuseok!
Oh, and Grandma Rowan.... I haven't gotten to call you yet because of the time difference (it's either too late at night or too early in the morning), but I hope you had a VERY happy birthday and I will call this weekend!
Molly, this is such an amazing record of your time in Korea! The pictures are great, and your stories are fun to read. I'm curious about your class sizes, though -- it seems you have only two students, and other teachers have three or four. How is that? Here, it seems all of those children would have just one teacher.
ReplyDeleteThanks for following! I've visited your blog a few times, too. I feel so much smarter having read it. If/When I grow up, I want a vocabulary like yours.
ReplyDeleteI typed out an extraordinarily long comment to your comment and then my internet pooped out on me for a second and I lost it all. Since I managed to collect my thoughts in the process, though, I think I can sum it up better than the first time.
Dongbaek, our city, is only 5 years old. Our school is going into it's third year. The growth is imminent, so I think the owners are trying to lay the ground work properly. To do that, they have to keep students separated into groups that fit their age and proficiency level. The word kindergarten is used loosely, students can attend our school from ages 5-7 (4-6 in America) before starting first grade at a public school.
Zach and I have the youngest students. His, though, came in already knowing the alphabet and most of the letter sounds. Mine knew nothing. He has four students. Liz has three students that are a year older and are in their second year at our school. Dustin has five students and John has nine. Both are teaching third year kindergartners, but Dustin's are a bit more advanced than John's.
Because the private school's here operate more for turning a profit than actually educating, the goal is to keep the parents happy so their kid keeps coming to school. To do that, the class has to be a good fit for their child. Long term, it makes more sense for the school to keep the levels separate even if right now they could earn more money buying pay one or two less teachers.
Why do I get the light end of the load? To be frank, it sounds like the teacher I replaced wasn't the best and because its too expensive to fire and hire someone, they just lightened her schedule to where she could kind of handle it. I would venture to guess, hopefully without sounding too pretentious, that in time, the weight will be more evenly distributed. I've already picked up one of John's elementary classes so he could have a planning period. All the kids graduate in March, and then the new school year starts. I'll be interested to see what happens then.
I hope that answers your question, without being too verbose. I like being reminded that things that are just common knowledge to me are not to my readers!