The temperature was dropping every day. On some days, my fingers were too numb to hold the chalk while teaching. We all wore winter coats all the time, even in the classrooms. I still had to wear a skirt, so I doubled up on tights. Now that it was almost Thanksgiving time back home, I was even more homesick, though I had grown up celebrating Chuseok, the Korean Harvest Day, not Thanksgiving, and I did not eat turkey. At some meals, the students tried to distract me with funny stories, almost as if they could sense my spirit sinking.
