::A Geek in Korea::

Retention, when coming back from a holiday, is a word that takes on a double meaning. First of all, it means how many students did you keep from last term, and it also can apply to the amount of knowledge students remembered when they come back from a long holiday like last week. I was extremely happy to see that my student retention was exceedingly high for both.

While enrollment isn’t yet complete, I’ve kept all but three of my current elementary school students. One student couldn’t read and was recommended to be placed in another level before the year started, failed all his tests, didn’t do any homework, had a poor report card, and quit. I knew he was leaving and had washed my hands of the whole incident when I told my boss beforehand. One girl moved to the United States to study for the next few months. One girl disappeared, but I hope she will return later in the week. She might be taking tests at her elementary school, which prevented her from coming back. This means I’ve kept almost everyone I had expected to have back in my first four classes. My kindergarten class is short three students at the moment, but they alternate teachers on different days, so I might not know if I am missing anyone until we have a full week’s worth of classes.

Out of fifty or more students, I lost one. I can’t expect to do much better than that. If my other classes are as good as this and we have more enrollment, I might even be able to have a few classes grow.

Now, keeping students is all well and good, but if my students forgot everything I taught them two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have accomplished much. Today was our review day, and I got to see how much my students remember from their lessons. While students weren’t "in the groove" again from their long weekend and week off speaking English at the school, their retention level was very high. Most of them completed the exercises perfectly, or with minimal help. It seems they may actually be learning. Amazing.