::A Geek in Korea::

Oddly enough, when students go on their summer vacation, it’s actually the busiest time for teachers in the English academy business. I’ve now got my morning classes for the next month set up, and we’re dealing with the headaches of adding new classes to the database at work. My normal classes have all been bumped up and I finish early. If I had my choice, I’d actually take this schedule all year round, extra hours and all. It’s a far cry from my first intensive class at the school where I was in so many classes I was babbling nonsense by the end of the day because my brain was nearly fried.

I wasn’t around when they settled on the curriculum for the new classes. It’s a very interesting new challenge that they’ve prepared for the students this time around. Instead of picking a horrible book and trying to make the students speed through it with lots of homework, they’ve combined all the different torturous books with serious English tests in them into one über-test book. I am responsible for testing students CONSTANTLY for the ENTIRE Month. Seventy pages or more of CONSTANT testing! I did my best to keep it interesting. I had my students laughing as I worked through the first TWO pages in our first class.

Today I had the joy of doing a series of long math questions written in English that are on some ridiculous elementary school tests in Korea. These questions are very long on setting up and figuring out, but very easy to actually calculate if you know all the vocabulary. It’s one of those “Trains leave at X time, traveling at Y speed, and if they arrive at this time, blah blah blah” sorts of exercises. Mostly it’s an excuse to make student waste a lot of time only to fail with a trivial mistake because they don’t know what words like “Trio”, “Half a Dozen”, or “Ratio” mean. The people that design these tests truly hate children on an entirely different level than normal test makers. The material we’ve compiled is like the testonomicon, a book of pure evil tests that devour the souls of all that attempt to complete it.

We walked through every step of the problems, and the students are totally better at them than I was when there were raw calculations involved. The only problem they had was trying to figure out what the actual problem was asking for to choose the right answer. Luckily, in both of the classes I worked out the problems I got answers that appeared on the test, so I must have done them correctly. Thankfully I only teach basic arithmetic vocabulary in most of these questions. If I ever have high school equivalent questions for geometry or calculus, I’ll be in trouble.

It’s like appearing on “Are you smarter than a 5th grader” except the students are all billingual and can do advanced math way better than I could ever do in high school, let alone elementary school. Luckily those two pages of English-Math questions are finished, and I can go back to explaining the subtle differences in vocabulary that leave the students baffled and rescue my dignity.