'Teaching'

I don’t know how many people actually read this thing but I’m checking in anyway because its been awhile since I’ve written my last entry. I’ve gotten comfortable living here, can’t actually believe I’ve been here a whole month already. It’s hard to pick up Korean phrases but I’m learning a few here and there, some of my students are the best teachers actually. In regards to ‘teaching’ What I do isn’t exactly what you would call teaching.

Just to give a glimpse into my day. At my school there are 4 Korean teachers and 2 foreigner teachers. While the foreigner teachers take care helping the kids with pronunciation and reading skills, the Korean teachers help the students with grammar and vocabulary. Each student has about 1 hr of English class per day. I have 8-9 classes per day that are 30-35 minutes per beginning at 2pm and ends at either 7:20 or 8:00 depending on the day. In my early classes there are younger kids, from ages 7-9 at different English levels. Then its 10-12 yr olds and ends with 13-15 yr olds later in the day. Basically all I do all day is recite words, sentences and phrases all day, pretty much the same ones too. It’s really repetitive, its not hard whatsoever but the kids have such bad pronunciations sometimes I may have them repeat words or sentences 10 times in a class and even then they still make the same mistakes the next day, it’s a little frustating but then again, its nothing too I get worried about, some kids will get it, some won’t. The issues I have a problem with are the same ones we all kinda know about already, the have problems with TH, R, L, V, F, P, say (gurl instead of girl, full instead of fall, birsday instead of birthday.

The kids in the first few hours are probably the worst because they have a really bad grasp of English and are just barely learning, most of what they know is the alphabet in some cases. There’s a communication break down so they tend to talk amongst themselves, act out in class or just avoid doing anything. Usually there’s always 1-2 bad kids that ruin it for the rest of them. (Each class I have can have anywhere between 3-12 kids in it) I’ve taken to some tactics such as moving kids from their seats, making a few kids sit in the corner and stair at the wall and as a last resort I call in the reinforcements: the Korean teachers, whom the kids have a deep fear of. They don’t hit the kids but they do things such as make the kid stand with their hands in the air for 5 mins or in some cases, make the kids stand while holding their chairs for 5 mins. I’ll get pictures next time of that. They can scare the kids because if they don’t listen the teachers threaten to tell their parents. It’s good times.

I like about half my classes with some students who really do want to learn and speak English more proficiently which makes for a great class. The older students are sometimes ‘too cool for school’ and are lazy but I just make them read if they don’t want to talk or don’t answer my questions. With the older kids I’m supposed to focus more on vocab and having conversations. Sometimes they want to talk, sometimes they don’t, no big deal to me. I don’t really have a curriculum with that last hr, so I can decide what they do and if they want to be little pricks, well they get to read. I’ll have a few pics up of bad kids within the next day or so.