Teaching gets easier for Emma

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So after a nightmare start on Thursday, my new life in teaching is getting better. I actually had a dream at the weekend, now this is genuine, and in my dream I had Lego hair which was bright yellow and someone stole it! It had to be one of the 'Bronx brats' but I couldn’t see their face but I was really upset! That kind of proves how distressed I was after last Thursday...

...Anyhow things have improved and I am currently teaching the loveliest, warmest Korean kids. I do have to teach the home boys on Thursday but I am a lot tougher now and I am ready for them! My classes today consisted of 4 boys who are normally very naughty for the Korean teacher but they were little angels for me. They turned up late so I 'punished' them by not allowing them to have any breaks so 2 of them ended up wetting themselves. Sorry, that wasn’t funny, I didn’t really punish them, and they didn't have a break as they arrived late so in order for them to get their work done they had to work through their break but I did give them a lolly and some water. Pretty generous teacher me! The children in my classes are really into Harry Potter, however, this seems to be one of only a few western media influences as none of them have heard of 'X factor', 'I am a celeb' or Take That. I am trying to educate them with pictures and showing them internet pages but they just laugh and say we westerners have big noses! Korean's take education very seriously and are prepared to do almost anything to see their children do well in every subject possible. They literally go to school from 8am until 8pm every single day, taking part in piano lessons, English lessons, Taekwundo and art classes throughout the day. I have never seen children work so hard and be so tired. It can be pretty sad when you ask the kids what they are doing at the weekend or after school and they just reply 'study'. There seems to be hardly any time for playing. The way they learn English is bizarre too, they simply memorise sentences. You try to teach them what words mean, sentence structures etc but you are instructed by the Korean teachers to say the sentence in English and the children merely repeat, picking out key words along the way and drawing a few pictures on the whiteboard. So, when they sit their English exam and a sentence they haven't memorised appears on their test paper then they are set to fail in most cases. There are of course some brighter kids who like to ask questions, find out what things mean etc but as a general rule the key to learning is memorising.

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Photos

2 of my home school students
The girl on the right constantly makes me laugh, each week she turns up with ripped homework. I ask her why and she tells me, 'My father do it, he hate me'.