Curt and I got our paperwork in order, finally, and headed over to the immigration office to make it all official – my contract and work visa are renewed for another year.
Back at work, I scrambled to record and score some more speech tests – this was for some lower level students that were mostly quite unprepared, which was perhaps the fault of my not-so-successful substitute teacher. I coached and coaxed them through the process, but ended up taking too long and running into the next class.
They're finished now. I've scored and posted almost 50 student month-end speaking test videos in the last 2 weeks – that has been my main responsibility. This business of posting every single student speech is a new idea, one that I'd recommended quite a while ago but which they finally decided to implement while I was in the hospital. I'm pleased with the result, but unhappy with the fact that so far the youtube "unlisted" postings I've been doing are so slow to load it ends up being kind of chimerical for the parents (who are the intended audience of these postings) – they see that the videos are posted but can't get the videos to load to their phones (which is where most of them try to get the videos).
I wonder if the fact that I load the videos to my youtube account (me being an American) means the videos are being hosted somewhere across the Pacific without optimization for viewing here in Korea. I wonder if the videos were loaded under a Korean-based youtube account, would they load better over here? Or is youtube's infrastructure just weak in Korea right now? Popular public videos seem to load fine, but all my "unlisted" videos are really unreliable.
Here is my favorite speech of all the speeches I recorded and scored. My student Somin isn't the most advanced speaker but I like that she puts her own, original thinking into her speech rather than just following a formula. The topic for a lot of the students, this month, was global warming. I know she's really hard to understand, but I do feel really proud of how she's done.
