Lunch with All-Day Club

On Friday, January 27 Jonathan and I, as well as many other foreign teachers, went out for lunch with the All/Half-Day Club.

All-Day Club is exactly what it sounds like: a class that goes all day from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Students in this club get all kinds of one-hour classes, each taught by a different teacher: conversation, pronunciation, grammar & writing, religion, as well as others that I don't have any idea about. Half-Day Club members join in the class at 1 p.m. Sometimes Half-Day Club members take normal English classes in the morning, too. Jonathan actually has four Half-Day members in his morning English classes. He teaches an hour of religion class on Thursdays at 2 p.m. to the All-Day Club. Even though I'm not technically a teacher at this institute since I work in the textbook office, I teach All-Day Club an hour a week, too. I teach a conversation class on Thursday at 5 p.m. In addition to their long week days at the institute, members of All-Day/Half-Day Club are also required to attend the weekend events, vespers (called FNF - Friday Night Fellowship) on Friday evening, and Sabbath School, Morning Clubs (like English-geared Sabbath School classes), and church on Saturday. Needless to say, they're pretty busy students with only one day off from learning and speaking English every week of the term. And since they spend so much together, they're all really good friends. It's great to see classmates get along so well and be so happy and jokey with each other.

For lunch, we went to a buffet restaurant called Ashley's. The food was delicious and we had the added benefit of having our students translate the food labels for us and tell us what was in each dish. During lunch one foreign teacher sat at a table with three Korean students. It was so nice to be able to talk to a few students in smaller groups and get to know them better. That's hard to do in class since there are 20 students in the class that Jonathan and I teach and 15 students in the lower level class. All in all, we really enjoyed the meal and the time out with our students. Given the chance, we'd certainly go again!

Pretty handkerchief collection on the restaurant wall

Tiffany, Daisy, Soo & me

Friends Stella and Trisha bought matching cell phone cases

Jonathan at his table of females: Julia, Jessica and Gisele