teaching

HIYA!

I teach only Monday to Friday from 2pm to 8pm. I look forward to the two hours that I have off in those times. They're a nice break. I'm the only foreign teacher; there are three others, all of them Korean, one of them is my boss. They don't work as many hours as I do. None of them sees all of the kids. They each take a set of the children to teach English grammar, pronunciaiton, and what else I don't know.

We haven't had a meeting nor have I had any training. There's a system here that I don't know. It's called Butter English but I don't know how it works. I don't know where I fit in. I know pretty well what I'm supposed to do but also know that I have lots and lots of freedom in the classroom. Whatever I see as appropriate.

I don't like the way this school works. There's no coordination amongst teachers as to what each of us teaches. So I'll teach, say, the Simple Past Tense, while another teacher teaches the same class prepositions. This is just an example I made up. I don't know exactly. But if that teacher were also to teach Simple Past Tense, students would understand my lesson much better, there would be more cohesion to the students' English language learning, and, just maybe, they'd be a bit more interested, and might even learn a little. They might become able to use the language. A little bit anyway.

As it is, most of these kids can hardly put three words together. Oftentimes they'll blurt out one or two words, sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. There isn't relaly much language ability being demonstrated here. My boss says that the past four years his kids have won the speech contests that are held among all the 7 schools using the Butter English method here on Jeju Island! If these kids are the most capable on the island ...!

I've told my boss my feelings regarding cohesion of the curriculum. About making lessons more coordinated among teachers. He says he'll change everything but has asked me to "endure" things the way they are until the end of the year. He's really busy. But he's honest so I believe we'll make some changes. He has told me the difficulties of making the curriculum more like the way I have told him I think is better. He agrees but says it's really really hard.

It's really frustrating for me when I teach the words "going to do" as in "will do" where the "going to" is not the verb "to go". The kids don't seem to already understand that this is not "to go". Yet explaining it to them and getting them to use it correctly is a real battle. There are other examples like this but never mind.

I've recently been adjusting my teaching style to use the books less. I really don't like them and the kids don't seem to like them much either. But I tell them that we can't play bingo all day every day. I have been using more games though because they're more fun than just drilling and doing the boring stuff all the time. I prefer to use material from the lessons for the game but that doesn't always happen. I'm trying to make the classroom environment more enjoyable for the kids as well as for me.

Plus I see that it's really a good idea for me to be able to speak Korean. Wow. So often I want to explain to them but just can't. I don't want to ask for help from others but have on rare occasions. Things would go so much more smoothly if I could communicate a bit in Korean. This is one of the things I've just started to learn: classroom Korean. Things like "Please read" and other things. I want the kids to understand these simple things in English though. But when I speak English, many of them just don't pay attention. Speaking Korean gets their attention much more. I suppose even that though, will wear off as they get more accustomed to hearing me speak Korean!

Enough, I'll write more about teaching in the future.

Troy.