영국여행 | England (Day 10)

I can't wink, how do you people do it?

This day was a great moment of serendipitous fortune, because we happened to be available and in London at the same time as our good friends Erin and Morgan. They were some of the first people we met in Korea, and recently finished their contracts and went back to live in the US. But they were coming up towards the end of what I will call a "world trip" because they genuinely went to so many amazing countries and cities over the course of quite an impressive amount of time, immaculately planned (in my opinion, anyway). So it was really exciting to have a final glimpse of them before dipping back into "when will I see you again?" territory. Sobs.

We'd booked in to see another Shakespeare play at The Globe, this time Much Ado About Nothing. But prior to that, we had a mosey around the Southbank area, including lunch at Pieminister (repping the West Country), which I ate too quickly to even think about documenting. That's how much I love those pies.

We still had some time to spare, so we went to the Tate Modern, which was just as confusing and incomprehensible to me as it was during a secondary school trip, which was the last time I'd visited. Maybe it's all too deep for me. I got more enjoyment looking at people looking at the art. Or is that also part of the modern art? Deep.

We were in standing for this performance, so I got to see all of the gorgeous painting above the stage in better detail. I like that I got to have an experience of both seated and standing.

영국여행 | England (Day 6)

London Bridge, thankfully not falling down.

Next, we headed back to London for Nick's mum's birthday. We had dinner at Bill's (do recommend! Been there a couple of times now and it's always delicious) before heading to the home of another Bill, The Globe Theatre (see what I did there, winkwonk).

Eton Mess, how could I resist?

The walk along the Thames from Bill's to the Globe was great, with the sky being all kinds of colours and full of clouds. So pretty.

Shakespeare Lessons

I'm sad I didn't think to take more photos of these lessons. Over the course of about 2 months (7ish lessons) I read A Midsummer Night's Dream with my six 5th grade classes. It was an idea from my co-teacher, who'd heard of a competition being run by the British Council to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday (or death-day, depending on how you want to look at it.)

Every lesson, we'd review the previous part of the story from the lesson before (except for the first lesson, where we learnt all of the weird and wonderful names we'd see) and then read the next "chapter". Now obviously, I can't get a mixed level class of 10-11 year old Korean kids to just read the original Shakespearean English, so I made a sort of animated Powerpoint storybook for each Act (although to save time a lot of them were of merged).

I figured that, since Shakespeare's plays are all intended to be seen as performative art, it would probably make it a lot easier on my students if they had more visuals than text to get the meaning across.

What really helped me with this is my awesome co-teacher. Even though I'd simplified the script to within an inch of its life, to have it make any sense to most of the class it still ended up a little complex. So once I'd read out each page or sentence, she'd ask questions to check their understanding, or just directly translate if it was still too hard. We'd fill in any cultural gaps together and answer questions after each slide.