Sunday, February 5, 2012

Mr. Joe....Kind of a big deal

A few weeks ago a newspaper reporter and photographer came to our school. In Korea, if you want to advertise in a newspaper it is VERY common to hire and pay for an interview. With a new school year approaching (Korean school goes year round, starting in March and ending the second to last week in February) our owner/principal decided to spring for a full page add in the local paper.

Joe was teaching a class and I was on a break. I was in his classroom hanging out when Ms. Flora, one of our Korean staff, came into the room with a photographer. She pulled me aside and told me that the photographer was going to take pictures of Mr. Joe teaching.

Ms. Flora- "many beautiful foreign woman teacher.... no many good teacher be foreign man.... you know this? ....only Mr. Joe take photo with children."

Joe would be star of this photo shoot.

The photographer took a few pictures then Joe and I started to have a little fun. I was shouting out questions to the students, easy things like 2 + 2, the kids all raised their hands and Joe would pose funny and point to a student. The photographer was loving it, and would take a picture then say "good!, one more time". It was a fun little ten minute adventure.

Well now that it's two weeks later Ms. Flora shows me the news paper article! I understood that we would put an ad in the paper but I never expected a full page article with a picture of Joe.
He is a pretty big deal around school these days. I have shown the article to all of my classes.

This is the first article that came out last week. 

The Korean woman in the top right corner is our boss/principal/part owner, Ms. Karen

close up of the picture of Joe teaching

 Today at lunch on our way home I saw a stack of these newspapers in the lobby of our apartment building and grabbed a few. (we are sending a few packages and I needed some stuffing to go in the boxes) As I was ripping through the paper to wrap a glass bottle I stumbled upon another article.


In the second article the picture of Joe is MUCH larger.



If anyone wants a signed copy just let me know. I took the entire stack of papers from the lobby on our way back to school after lunch. :)

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