Last weekend I had my orientation for the Birmingham MA.   Me and K went to Seoul early so I could pick up my course books in advance.  I’ve got them all now with exception of one that’s on back order.  The orientation itself was really good.  I thought it would be pretty dry but the presenter was excellent.  It’s amazing how interesting something seems when the person sharing the information has a passion for what he/she is doing.  I met some other students, we came from all over Korea to attend.

Unfortunately I’m the only student from Daejeon.  I had been hoping for at least one other to form a local study group, but I guess I’ll have to cope with email and skype.  After the orientation was finished we had coke and pizza for a half hour to get to know each other a little better.  Most of the Students seemed pretty nice.

The course officially kicked off on April 1st when the material became available online.  Due to differences in time zones, it translated to 11pm at night over here.  That didn’t make too much difference as I’ve been out of it with the flu since Wed.

I managed to make it through the Wednesday classes but I took Thursday and Friday off to recover.  It sucked using two of three doctor note free sick days, I had planned to use these over summer vacation.  Generally I find the vacations end on Thursday so I was going to call in sick for a Friday to get the full extra weekend out of it.   I consider this to be a victimless crime as my only purpose to be at school at this time is for ‘administrative duties’.  They really don’t have a use for us at the school during vacations but the powers above decreed that ‘every teacher’ has to come to school during the summer/winter breaks.  With two of my sick days already used it’s not going to happen this year.

Today I’m feeling alot  better, I’ve still got some chest congestion, and sinus problems, but the docs medications seem to be doing the trick.  So K & I went out to get my e-texts printed.  They’re set up now so all I need to do is set up a study plan to use over the next four months that’ll I’ll put into effect on Monday.  In broad terms it’ll be ten weeks of reading and about six weeks of paper writing.

I don’t have anything new to go on about for now, I think next weekend I may do some more cooking but it all depends on how well I stick to my guns over the course of Monday through Saturday.