Life as a teacher

I've been accused of having too much fun here in Korea. So I thought I'd give ya'll a glimpse of my daily schedule so you don't get the misinterpretation that all my time is spent shopping, getting my feet eaten by little fish, and traveling. :)

I usually leave for work around 1:30pm. Usually, I walk there, and it's a 20 minute walk. When I get there, I have two hours to prep for two-three classes (depending on the day) and eat lunch. Prepping involves thinking up comprehension questions, branching out questions (basically going on tangents to talk about things that the students are interested in so they'll talk more...for example, reading a story about how a seed grows, we end up talking about Halloween in America. Follow that path!!!), photo-copying quizzes and worksheets, coming up with fun games/activities so the class won't be boring, etc. Then I have my first class.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I teach three two hour classes. The first class on those days is my level two class. These kids are absolutely insane. I have to shout half the time to be heard above their collective roar. I have to ask them several times to take out their books. They are definitely a handful. I am exhausted after this class and I'm usually losing my voice by the second class that day.

My middle class that day is my level three class. I love these kids, they're definitely my favorite. Here's a class photo:





These kids make me laugh so hard sometimes. They are completely willing to contribute to class discussions and I rarely have to remind them not to speak Korean in class. They are all very well-behaved and they are very sweet too. Today we had some pretty entertaining discussions. For example, one girl in class asked me today, very seriously, if I thought that Jesus loves ghosts. Another boy, when doing a poster about Korean traditions, drew a picture of kimbap (the Korean version of sushi) eating George W. Bush. Sooooo entertaining.

My last class is full of angels. They are the perfect students. I only have five of them in this class. All girls. They always study, they all get A's, they never complain, they answer and ask many questions. The material for this class is frustrating because there isn't enough to cover in 2 hours. Sometimes I'm assigned two pages to cover in one class period for reading, which is supposed to take one hour. It's hard. I have to get creative and come up with things for us to do that are still meaningful and relevent but not just busy work either. Today I had them bring in family photos and we had a class discussion about our families. It was fun to hear about their families.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach two three-hour classes. My first class is also level two like my troublesome class on Mondays, but these kids are very sweet and much more well-behaved. It helps that there are only 8 in this class, whereas the MWF class has 15. On Tuesday these girls had made a snowflake/star thing to hang up in class. They wrote me a thank-you note with it. Made me smile. :-)

My second class is my junior high class that I wrote about before. This class is hard because they don't respect me and they won't speak or answer questions even. The three hours stretches on forever...seriously.

My job isn't just confined to these 8 hours though. I am always required to assign and grade five essays a month, one-two a week. It adds up. Sometimes, at the end of the week, I find myself with 30 essays to grade (and they have to be graded within a day or two after finished). These essays aren't easy to read either. Sometimes they will be pages long and have all sorts of ungrammatical, nonsensical sentences.

I also, once a month, have report cards due. These are extremely time-consuming and I am usually only given like two days to complete them. I have to calculate grades and write comments that will be helpful for the students and parents.

I usually get out of work around 10pm, but then I go to the gym for an hour. When I get done there, I come home (today I got home at 11:30) and I have to cook and eat dinner.

It's nearly impossible to have friends outside of work because no one has this same crazy schedule that we at Youngdo have. I'm extremely grateful for the fact that I get along with every single teacher at work. All of us hang out together on the weekends. I go shopping with the girls. We're not good, close friends yet but we have fun. The weekends go by in a blur...

In spite of all this extremely time-consuming work and even the frustrating moments that these kids give me...I absolutely love my job. I am so glad that I chose to come to Korea because so far, it is so much better than anything I could have expected. Which is saying a lot, since it's only been two months! I guess I could be in the "honeymoon" phase still but I don't think that's the case. We'll see!

This weekend, we're having a Youngdo "picnic" (Koreans refer to every school or work outing as a picnic) at Jebudo island. Apparently this island is famous for clam-digging and sunsets. I'm excited about this!

Time to go, essays to grade. :-)

I've made it this far already?

I had a minor victory of sorts today. Last week I was told by my boss, Lynn, that I was too nice to my students. She had me observe another teacher (Annie) to see practical ways to be strict while still being nice. It was kind of a hard thing for me to hear, because as we all know I am a perfectionist, but I think it improved my teaching methods.

Anyway, last night we had conferences with the parents and I guess all the parents gave me good reports! One of the students in my loud/crazy class, Peter, said that he hadn't liked being at Youngdo at first but now he's really starting to enjoy class and he told his parents he can tell that I am trying really hard to be strict and fun at the same time, so they think I'm a good teacher. That made me REALLY happy.


On Wednesday I was teaching my senior level students about noun clauses, and I ended up having to use some good ole Syntax knowledge to explain things to them. I worked out a handout for them that I made that showed the syntactic process of the question word moving around in the sentence. I didn't actually draw out the trees but I gave them five steps in how to make a question out of a noun clause. For example:

1. David arrived two days ago.

First step: What question word do you want to use to ask the question?
--> "When?"

Second step: What part of the sentence answers the question word? Replace that part with the question word.
--> "David arrived when?"

Third step: Move the question word to the beginning of the sentence.
--> "When David arrived?"

Fourth step: If the question word is next to the subject, then insert the verb "do" (tense matching the other verb in the sentence).
--> "When did David arrived?"

Fifth step: If there you inserted the past tense form of "do" in this sentence and there is another verb, change the other verb in the sentence to the present tense.
--> "When did David arrive?"

Ta-da.

I know. I am a linguistics nerd. But it really helped them understand, so it made me really happy to put my Bachelor's degree to good use!!!

Tomorrow is my first pay day, and for THAT I am thrilled. I'm going grocery shopping ASAP as I have been living off of rice for the past two weeks (except for the occasions when my amazing colleagues give me food, like bagels and apples!). I am probably going to buy a cellphone when we go into Seoul on Saturday. I have to pay some bills. I have to save money for my plane ticket home in December. But I will be happy because I get to have galbi and other non-rice food again! :)

I'll try to post more pictures soon too.