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Published: September 23rd 2017
Gyeongbokgung Palace
Nestled right in the middle of bustling modern city.Hey everyone,
Officially finished my second week of teaching! For the most part, so far so good, although I did encounter my first actually “bad” class. As I believe I mentioned last time, I teach elementary through middle school-edged kids. One of my (I believe) sixth grade (which is still elementary here; middle school is seventh and eighth graders) classes is four girls and one boy. From the very beginning, getting the girls in this class to concentrate was definitely more difficult than other classes-and that was when my role was literally only to play an audio file so they could do dictation work. The second week, Mpho (the other foreign teacher) and I were given more independence for some of our older classes in terms of teaching and lesson planning. So instead of simply doing dictation with the kids for the whole thirty minutes, I wanted to have them write their own role play scripts, something I commonly did in my Japanese classes. I did some research the night before, and gave my students handouts with graded information about an NGO in the US (the dialogue from the last class had talked about donating and why the Save the
The Blue House
South Korea's version of the White House Children was an important organization).
I gave them information, explained the assignment, and grouped them into a group of two and a group of three. That was my first mistake. Apparently, it is literally impossible for any of the girls to work with the one boy in the class. In addition, the girls were not at all interested in doing any work in class, anyways, no matter what I said, or how much I told them to do their work. After 10 minutes of trying to get them to write anything at all and failing while they ignored me and chatted amongst themselves, I tried to get them to at least speak English with one another. That also failed. In the end, I let them be and explained the assignment to my lone male student, who was the only one who was actually interested in learning how to write a script, and working on English. So I modeled it for him, explaining how I would write the script while he wrote it down, so that he would be able to do it himself the next time.
While I know the class wasn’t THAT much of a disaster in
the grand scheme of things, it WAS pretty discouraging. While I had heard that foreign teachers are often not taken as seriously as Korean teachers, that class was really my first concrete experience of that, and it was especially tough since I’m still not really sure how much I can discipline the kids at this point. Since hagwons (private after school academies) are businesses, I’ve heard from multiple other teachers that directors often don’t want us disciplining the kids, for fear that their parents will move them to a different school, and profit will be lost. In addition, I’m quite a bit younger than the other teachers at the school (Mpho is 25, and the Korean teachers are 29-35, the boss is around 45, and the secretary has children older than me). I’m also the least experienced in teaching, so I really don’t want to step out of bounds.
PS. I did the script writing with another class at about the same age/level, and they were actually successful. So I know for sure the assignment itself wasn’t the problem.
On the other hand, I did have a lot of progress with one of my other classes. I bribed
the kids with candy, and told them if they spoke only in English for the whole class, I would give them a treat. It worked! I ended class telling them that I expected that from them every class, and if they kept it up, I might bring them treats again. And not only did they speak only English, but they also actually discussed the questions and answers with one another OUT LOUD in groups. Like, sometimes I feel like it’s impossible to get the older kids to talk at all, so I was pretty proud when I finished the class with kids who were talking with one another-with interactions between the girls and the boys, even. So I guess this week the good and the bad balanced out in the end in terms of teaching.
In other news, as some of you know, I went to Seoul last weekend for an orientation through CIEE, the organization that sent me here. On the orientation, I met other Americans who are working in various cities throughout South Korea. We got some tips on teaching, and got to hang out in Seoul for the weekend. Aside from the fact that the teaching
FRIENDS!
The guy on the left is Bryan, and he graduated from UPS. On the right is Julia, who was my roommate and is from Puyallup, Washington. tips were more or less useless (they were either things we learned in the online course we took beforehand, or completely irrelevant to me—we talked about teaching kindergarteners for the whole three hours on Sunday. My youngest are third grade), it was definitely a worthwhile experience. I met some really cool people, two whom I plan to visit during my upcoming week off, and got to walk around Seoul late at night with them. In fact, of the people I plan to meet over break, one is from Puyallup, Washington (about 25 mins away from Tacoma), and the other graduated from UPS a year ahead of me. In addition, I met two people from Colorado, one of whom went to CU Boulder, and was in a class with one of my friends from high school. The world is actually tiny, it’s crazy.
While in Seoul, on Saturday night after orientation activities some friends and I wanted to go to Hongdae—the university area—to walk around and explore a bit, so we hopped on the subway. Unfortunately, we left too late, and the subway dropped us off at one of the stops on the route. Apparently the last train doesn’t start
Vending machine flowers
For when you know you f*ed up real bad, and need an immediate apology at 2 am at midnight; the subway stops operating at midnight, and no matter which stop you’re at, you’re expected to get off. We had no idea where we were, and no idea how far from our destination we were, so we decided to try to find a bus there, figuring that since there’s a university in the area, there had to be a bus that went there. We ended up walking for about 15 minutes before we even found a bus stop, and it turned out the stops were written only in Korean (in some cities, the stops are written in both Korean and English). I tried to ask the one other person standing at the stop which bus went to the university, and I guess he took one look at me and assumed I could speak Chinese because all of a sudden he was speaking to me in Mandarin and I was responding. It actually took me a second to even realize that I was communicating with him in Chinese. And honestly, I was so relieved to be able to have any sort of conversation in Chinese that I wasn’t even disappointed that he wasn’t helpful at all. We ended up
taking a taxi, which was good because it was late and we were still across town from where we wanted to be. But we made it to Hongdae and walked around for a couple of hours before getting ice cream at 1:58 am—two minutes before the ice cream shop closed—and taxiing back to the hotel.
On Sunday, I hung out in Seoul for a few hours after orientation ended, before heading back to Gwangju. Getting back was a surprisingly difficult endeavor, because the station that I was told was the Seoul Central bus terminal was not actually the bus terminal, and no busses left from it, only the high speed trains (KTX), none of which went to Gwangju. The actual bus terminal was across town, and would take about an hour by subway to get to. As it was, due to unforeseen circumstances I was already leaving an hour later than I wanted to, so I chose to go to the other KTX station and just take a KTX home. Because the KTX is about an hour faster than the bus, I made it home by 1 am Monday morning, which wasn’t too bad, and now I know for
next time where I need to go to get the bus back (since the bus is a bit cheaper than the train, and I don’t have to worry about missing my stop).
Earlier this evening, Mpho and I found the bar downtown that serves most of the American expats, so that was cool. However, it turns out that majority of expats here are like 40 year old men, so…. next time we will try the university area, to see if we can find people who are maybe closer to our ages. At this point, I would take university students trying to learn English and wanting to do a language exchange, but I really need to find friends here, preferably within 5 years of my age.
Next weekend marks the start of Chuseok, South Korea’s Thanksgiving, so I will hopefully end up in Busan visiting my friends from Seoul for the first half of the week-long break, and maybe in Jeju with Mpho and one of our Korean coworkers for the other half. We shall see!
Until next time!
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Carol
non-member comment
Challenging students
Sounds like you had some challenging students. I found rewards are sometimes the only way to get thru to those who aren't self motivated to learn. Love reading your stories ms. Katie