Since I started teaching everything is going so great. For the first three weeks I have been teaching math lessons. They have gone really well. The students really seem to enjoy my classes. They are all really involved and everyone participates. I am very impressed with their English abilities. I have just learned to speak very slowly and loud. I also work hard to use more simple words (not all the time but for the most part) and a lot of hand gestures. Plus, I always have the homeroom teacher there to help translate for the students who don’t understand. However, I often feel like the teachers underestimate the students’ English abilities. I can see many times the students are frustrated when they have to listen to the same thing I just said in Korean. They are just eager to start the activities.
I love the teaching and find myself always busy with preparing lessons and grading assignments and such, but I do have one complaint. I am not being given good direction in what to teach. For example, during my second week I was teaching multiplication and division. The instruction I was given about what kind of lesson to prepare was, “Just teach two lessons: one on multiplication and division.” That’s it. I asked for more specifics such as should I teach how to multiply two or three digit numbers or should I work on times tables or anything. Just saying that I should teach multiplication and division is so vague and I tried hard to get more specifics, but was unsuccessful with getting a useful response. I talked to Professor Kang about this issue and she spoke with the teacher, so hopefully now I will be getting more detailed instructions on what to teach.
The students in all the classes have for the most part been really well-behaved. The only issue that I have is that they are very talkative and can become quite loud. From my observations of the Korean classes, this doesn’t seem to bother the teachers, so they have never been conditioned to be quiet. I have imposed a discipline plan with them to control this issue. If someone is being loud or disruptive or just not doing what they are suppose to be doing I will come and place a post-it on their desk. I do this silently so that I do not disrupt the rest of the class. This is their warning. If they do it again I will come by and write a checkmark on the post-it and this is their final warning. The next time they misbehave I put a second check mark and they have to see me after class and will be given homework. This system has worked out wonderfully. Usually all I have to do is hold up the post-its and the class quickly starts behaving properly.
Although I love the teaching part of this experience, it has become quite exhausting. I have 9 classes that I have to teach the content subjects (which has been math but will be science next week). So on one day I will have 5 periods of teaching the content and the next day I will have 4 and this continue to alternate every day. Unfortunately by the time I have taught the same lesson 9 times, I grow to hate it. It’s good because I get the lesson down to a T and fix any mistakes and kind of know what to expect from the students, but it is quite redundant. I like to think that I am just getting a lot of practice. In addition to my content classes I also teach an English conversation class, I co-teach a phonics class twice a week, and then I also co-teach drama twice a week. Then in addition to all my teaching I have two meetings each week that are about 2 to 3 hours long apiece. Then on Monday nights I have to go straight from school to our private Korean tutoring for two hours. I love the tutoring though, I really want to learn some Korean while I’m here and this is really helping me. On Thursdays I leave straight from school and go to the two hour weekly meeting with Professor Kang. Here we just discuss our weeks and talk about issues. One thing that we’ve done is that we opened this meeting to all students from Korea University’s education department. So we get anywhere from 10 to 20 students who attend this meeting and we get to discuss various educational topics. Quite honestly it’s my favorite part of the week. So my weeks are pretty busy and packed full of stuff. I am finding myself very exhausted come Friday, so I use the weekend to recuperate.
I am so thankful that the teaching is going great, but I am even happier that I am having a blast here in Korea. I am making so many friends and I keep adding new ones every day. For the first month I just hung out with people from our dorm. So I made friends from all over the world, but I noticed that I haven’t been meeting too many Koreans. This was disappointing because I want to get a good experience of Korean culture. So for the past week or so I have basically hung out with only Koreans. It is so much fun, but a little awkward because for the most part they don’t speak any English, so for hours I just sit around with them listening to Korean. It’s great!!! They are so warm and welcoming and friendly. One thing I find funny is they call me a “celebrity” at our local hangout, because every time I go there I just sit with a different group of Korean strangers who quickly become my friends and they all want to take pictures with me. So I am popping up in so many photos that people know me and I have no idea who they are. It’s kind of weird but I have to admit I love it J !
Since we are all so busy here with teaching and preparing teaching stuff and working on our portfolios we haven’t had much time to do any touristy things. So Stephanie and I have decide to stay an extra two weeks and really explore Korea; I am very excited about this. Since last week we have decide we will try to do at least one touristy thing either on Saturday or Sunday every week. So last week Stephanie and I went to the Seoul Tower. It was definitely a huge hike!!!! It took over an hour to walk all the way up to it. There were soooooo many stairs that my legs have been aching all week. But it was worth it. One thing that was disappointing was once you get up to the top of tower you can look out the windows and see all of Seoul, but that day was so hazy that it wasn’t a great view. After visiting the tower we debated on walking back down the “mountain” and decided to take the cable car which got us there in under 5 minutes.
That's the update on my situation here! I will be trying to post more often from now on...
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