::A Geek in Korea::

During my last week before vacation, I have to prepare my students for their new lessons. Their new term starts this week, so all the fun of new books, new schedules, new students, and new classrooms just as I’m preparing to leave for a month.Today is my longest day. I’ve got no breaks, and I teach six hours straight through. This will probably be the easiest class I’ll have too, because a lot of time is wasted getting the right students in classes, distributing books, and going over the new materials for each level.

While my classes yesterday weren’t very different, with mostly entire blocks of students moving up levels together with a few new students, my classes today were sometimes completely new or greatly expanded. A lot of the “good kids” went up a few levels to join my classes in some cases. They are welcome.

I only had one set of classes with students that were a little strange. The students in my first class showed up wearing matching shirts. It’s their school uniform. They ran around the school saying “Samdungi!” which means “Twin!” over and over again. It’s funny the first time, but twenty times later it tends to grate on the nerves. “Yeah, I get it.”

Later, I taught some students I’ve had in class for a year straight. Instead of using the book I had recommended, they got bumped up significantly and will start learning TOEFL iBT. Instead of intensive TOEFL, I’m only responsible for teaching them a portion of the test, and the one I’m best at. I’ve got to whip a bunch of elementary school students into lean and mean speaking machines.

Today, I went through what would be expected of them during the TOEFL iBT test. “You’ll be given a Independent speaking question. You’ll have 15 seconds to read and organize an answer. You’ll have to speak for 45 seconds, answering the topic completely with clear organization and grammar with as few pauses as possible. This is the EASIEST of the tests.”

Their jaws just sort of dropped into their laps and stayed their for the rest of class. The students that had been bumped up a few levels were looking at me like I was a mad man.

Later, while I was waiting for a student to arrive, I watched the students doing their computerized learning. The students were using a program that played audio. They then had to type what they were listening to in English. The program would check their results. Occasionally it would offer hints, like the length of the word.

Everything the student did, from the time it took to complete the test, the mistakes made, the difficulty of the words, the number of times the students listened, was recorded. Then, when the students completed their tests, it was sent to a website that tracks the information. From there, they could see, in real time, how they compared to every student in the entire program. Did they do better than most students? Did most of the other students get this question correct? What percentage missed it? How long did it take the rest of the students to complete this section? Every aspect of the student’s progress and performance could be compared to his peers.

There were multiple levels of materials, and students in different classes might be answering multiple choice questions, translating into Korean, Translating into English, doing dictation, or any other number of competitive testing exercises. Everyone in the computer lab was dead silence trying to do the testing as quickly as possible. There was intense concentration on the faces of students as they listened to something the third or fourth time to catch a spelling mistake. I just sat back and watched as they worked.

This sort of program for learning is something like what I would have done if I had gone into a career that I studied in college, then had ended up using that skill in Korean education somehow. I was impressed that everything worked so smoothly. The data collection, streaming, and organization was impressive. The students don’t like it, because they have to do it at home. The teachers just view it as another tool to sharpen the children’s skills. I’m probably the only person that has appreciation for the work that went into making such a program.

I don’t have to worry about this long schedule for another month, but considering the classes and the mostly awesome students, it wasn’t that bad.