Getting Ready for the New Semester

You may have seen this picture of our teacher's room that I recently posted.  The bookshelves in the background hold years' worth of accumulated textbooks and files, many of which are no longer used.

So, as part of our effort to get ready for the new Korean school spring semester--which officially began yesterday (Friday, March 2nd), but which begins for our academy on Monday--the other teachers and staff that I work with spent a good amount of time cleaning out the bookshelves.  Here is the "after" pic:

Much better, isn't it?  We are hoping to donate most of the old English education books and games to 1) a Korean orphanage and 2) a North Korean immigrant program.  Here's a pic of some of the stuff we had to sort through that we removed from the teachers' room:

The cassettes, as you might well think, are clearly outdated and needed to go.  The "Let's Go" book series, which we use a lot of, just came out with a new edition, so we are replacing all of those texts.

Yesterday our school also added two new video screens to two classrooms, as we are going to be using video segments for a new middle school textbook.  We will get two new laptop computers next week and hopefully will have the same easy-to-use internet/video connection that we have enjoyed in our large classroom:

We are all hoping for a smooth start to the new semester, especially with so many new things happening; we also have a new school van (#7; the vans pick up and deliver students), many new students, new books, a new part-time teacher, and, best of all, our former school director who has been out for most of a year battling cancer (successfully!) is back with us.  Yeah!