I thought i finally had my basic adult class figured out. As per another teacher’s advice, on Monday I had printed out an excellent article over at the English in the News at the BBC. I found this article about global warming, which has a nice breakdown of the words in the article to explain what they mean in easier terms. Then, there was a set of questions I gave them based off this article, provided in the PDF file on the site. That’s new material, new writing work, and new vocabulary to talk about. I gave this to them two days early, and told them I was going to discuss it on Wednesday with them. I expected them to prepare for class by translating the words they didn’t know, write the work out, and ask me detailed questions when I returned to discuss it with them.
I got silence.
I spent forty-five minutes basically talking to myself as I went over, sentence by sentence, each item in the article. Detailed examples. Extremely simple English. Slow word count. I waited for their questions. I asked them questions to see if they understood. No one tried to say anything. At the end of class, after we did some book work, I stopped and asked if anyone was going to talk. I had about five minutes until my class was officially over, but I hadn’t had anyone really talking the entire time. I answered a few questions, and if someone wanted me to repeat something, I had, but no one had even attempted conversation. I wasn’t going to spend the last five minutes talking to myself, so when no one spoke for a minute, I walked out.
I was a little annoyed, but it was clear everyone had something to say, but no one was willing to say it to me. I waited around, and soon two women came into the office for a chat. They said they felt the topic "Didn’t relate to them."
I wanted to say, "Yeah, silly me. How the hell could global warming relate to someone LIVING ON EARTH?!"
Instead, I calmly replied, "Ok, so what sort of topics would you like me to talk about in class?"
The women thought about it for a little while, then replied, "Children, or food."
This is total bullshit, as I had spent an entire class trying to prod them into talking about childhood obesity , which is children and food condensed into one topic and they didn’t say a damn thing.
It seems the teacher that shares this class has more success with them, as she is a woman and can get them gossiping and sharing small talk. It’s not like I have some sort of overtly masculine personality that prevents me from talking about something relative to shut in housewives. It’s just that I can’t narrow my view to as small a cone as to create "Korean Housewife tunnel vision".
I’m starting to dread the class, as I really haven’t found a way for them to speak outside of small groups that don’t involve me. if it comes to them breaking up into groups every time we do something to get them to talk, it takes me out of the conversation. This is fine, as it’s less strain on me having to speak, but it doesn’t make me feel like I’d doing much. If they want to speak English, but don’t want to speak to me, I don’t see the point of everyone coming to class.
