::A Geek in Korea::

I’m back to teaching once again. Although I haven’t recieved any training about the "method" my new school employs, I seem to be making it through the majority of the day relatively well enough to avoid causing any major problems. The school varies from my last, as there is a Korean "head teacher" that organizes classes and maintains the schedule. There are at least six other teachers, and I don’t envy anyone that has to organize all of that while keeping in contact with parents.

Some of our classes are hellishly long for the students. Some of the students sit in class upwards of four hours a day. This is their vacation time, so we have morning intensive classes that add extra hours to the schedule. One teacher will handle two hours, then another will teach the next two. There are ten minute breaks between classes where the students can run to the bathroom or chat with friends. Some of the afternoon classes are split into  three lessons between three teachers.

Each of the teachers is compartmentalized by their teaching focus. I teach speaking and reading, and all my lessons are geared to teaching these two disciplines. This means I get a lot of "repeat after me" classes, where I try to pick out stduents having a hard time with pronunciation and give them extra help. In a class of twelve, this is next to impossible since we mostly read together. I also have been trying to get students speaking by answering questions about the text and what different words mean.

For the most part, their behavior has been really good. If I was trapped in summer English, I’d be pretty surly after the fourth hour too. Most of my students were completely surpised to learn that someone living here for five years could understand nearly everything they were saying. I got the impression that past foreign teachers at the school didn’t know what was going on when their students were speaking Korean. I don’t want to make it a habit of speaking in Korean to them though. That’s a tough habit to break when the students begin to rely on it.

The paperwork required for classes is time consuming. As of right now, I have to check homework, reward students, take attendence, assign homework, and list what I did in class. I also have to grade daily journals and look over any written work I assign. I’ve been given tons of schedules and papers to coordinate where I am supposed to go and who I am supposed to teach, but I still don’t even know where I would go if my proper books weren’t on my desk when I left the office.

I don’t know how I will coordinate any of the material I share with other teachers. I’m not even sure what the teachers that share my classes even do. I teach in three different rooms, never in the same room more than once or twice a day, so I have no way of integrating large, multi class projects into my study environment. My impression of my new school is that it reminds me much more of a machine than a place of creative people trying to share educational principals the best way possible.

I’m feeling a little confined by the paperwork and "system" at the moment, but once I get on top of what papers need to be pushed to make things run smoothly, I hope to be able to share my talents and get back into the groove being creative and having fun with my job.