The difference between Kimchi and Sushi

So most of you might know I have spent a year in Korea and well a bit of time in Japan so far. But even with my short time here I have noticed some extreme differences. Now there is abosulutely no way I can catagorize all the differences in just one post. Thus, since the place where I have spent the most time thus far in both the countries is at school, I will talk about some of the differences I see here at school in this post.

So first off, the place where I definitely spend most of my time at school, the office!
In Korea, I had my own office that I shared with my English teaching cohorts. In my case, there was one other native English teacher at my school, and a Korean teacher and then there was Kate. Kate was our very special...helper. She did not have a teaching certificate so was technically not allowed to teach, but she made sure our classes ran smoothly and no student got too out of hand. We probably drove her crazy. There is a reason there is not a Kate at every school.
Our office was a small little thing that really barely fit all of our desks. Additionally we had a full army of our very own machines in that room; including multiple heaters, an ac unit,  2 printers, 4 speedy slender desktop computers, a huge copy machine, fans, and craft supplies. Somehow it and us all fit. However it was OUR office. With no one else.
It was also very clean as we cleaned it ever Wednesday (or Friday depending on the semester).
While in the office there were practically no blocked sites and when desk warming in the winter in the absence of students facebook and megaupload movies were a constant feature on our computer screens. I once even caught more than one coworker playing Starcraft. No surprise there I suppose.
Now let me say a word on everyone else's office. Their offices were practically their classrooms. They had all their tech gear for teaching a class and their desk furnished with their computer in one corner of the classroom. This is much how I remember it being in America when I was little. There were a few admins who had their own office and then a few of the interning personnel who had a desk in the vice principals room which also served as a large meeting room. This room is where everyone would gather for coffee in the morning and where everyone would come at the end of the day for a bit of respite. It was a large room with a large circular table. In the winter and summer, what staff remained at the school would set up temporary offices here rather than in the solitude of their rooms. It was a super friendly environment.


My desk and office in Japan is no less friendly, possibly even more so as all the teachers share one room. Teachers who are home room teachers also have a desk in this room, but are more frequently absent from it. The head of the room is presided over by the school leader. A person who addresses the masses, er teachers, and deals with their concerns. Beside him sits the vice principal and an adjoining door connects the principals office to the teachers room.
The room itself is relatively free of large machinery,for its size, save for several printers strategically places about the room either for printing in color printing, and copying, or just a black and white printer. Every desk varies in size and shape and has drawers of varying degree as well. Every teacher is furnished with a desk and a laptop. Anyone know knows me has heard me talk about these laptops. They are approximately 6-8 centimeters thick, weigh like 6 kilos, are slower than frozen slugs in the dead of winter, frequently lose internet connection and are over all better used as boat anchors. If you are wondering exactly what make and model it is, its something like a model-T Fujitsu, which seems to be the sponsored brand for Japanese schools.
These computers were certainly less friendly to me than the Korean computers I was accustomed to, as they have a similar but slightly different keyboard than western computers. Sure you can type just fine, but whenever you want to add punctuation or think you know where that plus sign or at mark are, think again! Additionally it is fairly easy to change languages on these computers and a bit more difficult to change back. There are exactly 4 keys on my key board that will change my words from English to either romanji ( yes it is different), katakana, kanji or hiragana. AND THEN as if that wasn't enough, you can either keep the western keyboard orientation when you switch...or you can switch to the hiragana keyboard which requires me to hunt all over the keyboard for the right character. I have recently figured out the exact combination of two keys that I need to hit in order to return to my sort of normalcy (its alt and the key beside the 1), since it is impossible to revert back on the computer interface... though I suspect my computer being especially special in this case. Often these schools will have visiting teachers or teachers who only come in once a week for whom they will also have a desk and computer.
In a separate adjoining room in the back we have all of our machinery capable of printing more pages in a minute than the Occupy protesters present right now in New York. It also works to my advantage that is is the dead of night there as I write this. Next to that room and still attached to the main room is our admin office...I am not really certain what these people do...
The rooms themselves aren't really all that clean. In fact I have never seen anyone pick up a broom in my office. My desk is by default one of the cleanest for the simple reason that in comparison to the other desks, there is nothing on it. Today a guy two desks down from me had an avalanche of papers. His desk, or lack thereof, is definitely one of the most impressive I have ever seen. The office being dirty is a little on the strange side for me, as in Japanese schools there is a special time after lunch that is reserved for cleaning and all the students must take to broom and cloth to wipe the room clean.

A few of the other differences include the structure of the building itself. My Korean school was very small with only one class per grade; however this can be attributed to my living in a very small town. It was a one building school, with 3 floors and about 15 classrooms for various purposes. An addition of a cafeteria and an afterthought of building a fancy English center over head were a later attachment to the school adjoined to the main building with a sheltered wooden walkway.
Whereas in Japan my school is huge 4 stories and 3 separate buildings with around 50 classrooms. It has a swimming pool and a huge field ( this is a junior high school with a swimming pool but the junior high school in Korea did not have one). The fields at both my elementary and junior high schools are hands down bigger than that of my Korean school, but again this can be attributed to my living in the Korean boonies.
But with all its luxury it is no match for the technology of Korean classrooms. Sure my schools in Japan are furnished with lovely smartboard televisions and 4 meter long chalk boards.
But in my Korean school, I had a blue screen, a projector for physical objects, a projector, and a 60 inch touch screen television at my disposal. Not to even mention that in their regular classrooms, my students each had a tablet netbook that they would use for their lessons. The trade off for all of this electric magic was having itty bitty white boards that flanked the T.V. and could not do much for whiteboard teaching. Meaning, I had to always have an elaborate powerpoint at the ready. The other trade off was that our rooms had no windows. I am not really sure why that is since there was an obvious plan for windows from the outside, they were blocked off from the inside.

Photos!
In Korea:

Japan!

JHS

Elementary School

a new elementary school: