::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve got a daily class now with the same students. I teach adults day after day, and I’ve learned from the last experience I had teaching adults that you need to keep things fresh and do something different now and again. Having finished the unit I needed to complete to my satisfaction, I had a day of games to kill some time. I brought back one of my easy low-prep games that I’ve perfected with my elementary school students to see if it would work in modified form with adults.

Call out bingo, for those that don’t know, is played with a vocabulary list of sufficient length from any book, a piece of paper, and a writing tool. That’s all you need to play game for around 30 minutes depending on the difficulty of the words and the level of the students. To play:

Fold the piece of paper in half four times. You end up with a grid of sixteen rectangles. Tell students to write the words that they know and can explain WELL IN ENGLISH from their vocabulary sheet in the sixteen blanks. Then, write each of the students names somewhere in case people don’t know each other well enough.

Play proceeded like this: Describe, explain, or generally give hints about one of the words on your list without saying your word. Then scratch that word off your own list. If you did a good enough job describing the word, other people in the group will then scratch out the word they think you were talking about. They’ll write your name next to that hint. Also, when other players give words, you should call out if you think they’ve repeated a hint you gave and force them to pick another word.

When running this game, be sure everyone writes the name of the person that gave the hint. That way, when someone completes the board and says “Bingo!” you’ll have a record of all the people that gave hints. Each person then must verify which hints the finish player attributes to them. Bad or confusing hints can get resolved after the game. You can ask people if they meant one word or another, or explain any mistakes. Students that chronically ignore others will get embarrassed because they’ll end up missing what other people say, or repeat hints and get called out for it. Students with quiet voices will be forced to speak up so that the entire class can hear their hints.

This game does put lower level students on the spot when they struggle to explain something with poor vocabulary, so you need to have a quick, intuitive grasp of their hints to ask follow up questions if they struggle consistently. This is definitely a game for upper level students with better vocabularies, unless you let students look up words in electronic dictionaries between their turns as they go around. I didn’t explicitly ban that, so I said nothing to the student that was using a phone dictionary. Self-help is fine, as long as they are still making sentences and not falling behind in the game as it goes around.

The best part of this game as a teacher is that it forces students to try to explain words to one another, which can help you see how they think about each of the words. At the end of the game, if you are studious enough to check off every hint on your master sheet of vocabulary, you have a list of words that the students think they know. Usually there are always a few words left off every list. You now know the hardest vocabulary that the students didn’t understand, or feel that they could explain. It’s a perfect way to review again and get them confident about words that they previously thought they didn’t know!

Best of all, it’s a way of reviewing vocabulary without needing to resort to short quizzes or repetitious drilling. Students don’t want to be called out as not being able to explain words on their turn, and they’ve got to find sixteen words they know at least and recognize the other people’s hints when they are being talked about.

After the game was finished, I asked my students what they thought of it. They all said it was challenging, but that it was useful to study vocabulary and helped them learn new words. I’m happy my game got a positive response the first time out of the gate. I’ll have to try some of the others I’ve developed over the years with my students as I’ve got five more weeks of classes to get through and classes that meet five days a week can just get boring.

Be warned, since it is a bingo game people expected prizes. I gave out drinks and snacks.

One of the things that has most surprised me about being a parent has been the disappearing “alone” time. It makes sense that a baby would need attention and requires someone looking after them the majority of the day, but I never really realized how that would affect my wife and I. I’m someone that enjoys my alone time, and I miss it a little. These days, whenever I can sneak a walk with the dog in between baby naps, or get out to enjoy myself I relish in the opportunity. I love spending time with my daughter, but when she starts crying because she needs to be fed, a task I can not do, I simply need to get some quiet time by myself.

I feel bad because while I don’t have as little time by myself as I once did, but my wife is even more locked into this situation because she’s working at home and is a full time mom too. Today Glow had developed a cough, so while I was at work she had to try to get her checked at the hospital. While it doesn’t look serious yet, my wife still had to spend all day with sick children while she took care of Glow waiting for the doctor.

I have to work late a lot more often these days, so it’s really tiring both of us out. She’s exhausted from looking after the baby all day, I’m exhausted from teaching all the time, and the baby is a little sick. I feel a little guilty having an excuse to stay out of the house, but it’s not always been as busy as it has been the past few weeks. My hope is that everything will settle down soon.

I was alerted today that the deadline for submitting a syllabus for my elementary school program classes was happening much sooner than I expected. This meant that I needed to plan an entire series of classes from scratch in a day. I was teaching someone else’s class last time, so I didn’t do any preparation. The materials were just arriving in my office as if by magic.

Now I needed to plan from scratch all the stuff I wanted to do. I was given a thick stack of books and told to design the materials for myself. This would normally require heroic measures. It became even more of a challenge when I had a quiz to prepare for my classes next week, an examination of even greater importance, and I was also asked to “volunteer” for a promotional English festival tomorrow.

I stayed at work the latest I’ve ever worked at a school voluntarily trying to get everything finished in time. Even with all that work, I still had to go home and buy food for the family since our fridge was empty. The work load isn’t going to decrease tomorrow either. The festival is eating up the entire afternoon I had set aside to buy office supplies for my desk, plan my examination, and anything else I was going to get done while at work after class. This weekend begins my elementary school program classes once more, and I’ve got more and more stuff that seems to be popping up every single day. I’m a six day a week teacher, and I’ve got the work load for even more!

I got my quiz completed today, and the syllabus is 90% complete already. Tomorrow I’ll get through my classes and try my best. This weekend is Halloween, so my elementary school classes should be fun if I get a chance to buy candy. All the elements are in place that I will get through this week, but I’m feeling the pressure and wondering if every week will be like this one.

I think if I were a student in my own class, I’d recommend being in the last class I teach of any particular set of materials.

Right now I’m still working out how to structure my classes and trying to find value in the book materials. The first class I had this afternoon was really difficult. The students are a bit immature, and they also aren’t confident speakers. One or two people dominate the classroom discussion, and when I pair them in groups the entire class just goes silent. It didn’t help that the materials I needed and notes were somewhat shuffled and I struggled to present the materials in a clear manner.

I had also just said goodbye to my parents. I had taken them to the bus stop and said my farewells, quickly rushed home for a fast lunch, packed my dinner, and ran (literally) to the bus stop to get to work on time. I was flustered, emotional, disorganized, and somewhat out of focus for that lesson. Luckily I had three chances to get it right. I feel I consistently improved each time I taught the lesson, but I always feel bad for my first classes, “Wait! Come back! I can teach this lesson better! Give me another shot in an hour! I’ll do better! Really!”

This week I was so busy with things outside of work I didn’t have adequate time to prepare to my satisfaction. Things are starting to ramp up now, so I’ll need to focus even more. With schedules being what they are, and my syllabus being compressed into half the time of a normal teacher’s work, I’m so rushed that I can’t really revisit things to my satisfaction. If I had the choice I would probably not have picked the current class project that I’ve assigned. Next semester when the books get assigned I might have enough creative ideas to work out what I want to do with these classes. Not that I don’t enjoy teaching these classes, or even using someone else’s materials. I do, but next time I think I’ll be better at it.

On the other hand, my daily pass/fail classes that started this week are AWESOME. Today the students chatted for thirty minutes all on their own with minimal prompting. I had a great time talking and they all brought up interesting ideas. If all my classes were like this, my job would be an absolute delight. These students are taking them as electives, and pay to be in the class. While I’m exhausted after teaching three credit courses, the two hours I spend with students taking these courses just breeze by even though I see them every day of the week. I hope that continues, because a bad class that meets daily would really be awful.

The concept of being a college professor is starting to really sink in now. I’ve got syllabus things, independent study, classroom projects, public speaking appearances, and all sorts of work inside and outside of the office to do to keep up as part of my job. It’s very challenging and interesting, but I’m still trying to get a handle on what’s going on and planning my materials.

Right now I feel like I am a flower in a vase sitting on a table and someone is going to rip the tablecloth from underneath and it will all shatter into a million pieces. It’s all nice and neat, but it might become harsh and difficult without any notice if I don’t maintain my highest level of work all the time.

This is why teaching adults always bothers me. I get more and more focuses on any mistakes I make, and nitpick myself to death. Teaching adults takes a lot more time to prepare and I am not as used to the materials and levels of expectations my students have for me. My elementary school classes are always easy. Teach a class, play a game, everyone is happy. Now I would fret and worry if the game was too one dimensional, or if the students would have been better served by a group game versus an individually personalized game.

I just can’t win when I do that to myself, because I can see that I need more time to improve. I had eight years to perfect my elementary school lessons, and I hope I have a lot more time to settle on how I’m going to teach university students too. I know I can do it, but I’ve just got to work hard at it and improve.

This is going to be huge.

We went to an incredible garden this morning. According to my well traveled father, who does gardening and landscape work professionally, he ranked it in the top 10 in the entire world. He was comparing it to gardens that were centuries old that he had visited and was talking about it favorably. He was astounded to learn it was only a 15 year old garden. I’ll post more pictures later. This place was absolutely breathtaking, and I can’t WAIT to visit it again with friends. Why this place isn’t more heavily promoted in foreigner circles is a complete mystery.

It’s rewritten everything about “must see” in Korea in my book.

I’ll go out of my way to take people here if I can.

Then we took a bus to Seoul. We traveled around Seoul, and when we got to tourist heavy Insadong I left the family with my wife. I headed back to Daejeon to teach my classes that started today. I had to get there and plan my classes while my wife got my family back to town safely. I arrived with just enough time to spare. I taught my two new classes and did a pretty good job considering the time I had to prepare and the fatigue of traveling around Korean just to get to the class.

While running back from Seoul was frantic and made me stressed, it was worth it to see this with my parents. I think they’ll be talking about this trip with lots of praise for our choice, and it will be memorable for reasons different than last time we took them around.

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Pomplamoouse is amazing.

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They produce ‘Videosongs’, which follow the rule that if you hear it, you’ve got to see it. This is why I don’t even bother following music anymore. There are too many amazing bands waiting to be discovered that I’ll never hear to get excited about just one.

(Found on: Andrew Sullivan’s Mental health break)

My parents arrived Thursday night at one thirty at my house. We got them to the hotel with a call taxi, then met again the next morning. They spent the day chilling out and recuperating at our house. We went for a walk and talked. They hung out with Glow for a long time. Then we went to Indy, the upscale Indian food restaurant in the city. My wife and I picked up the bill and we walked home. We visited the busy night life area nearby, then went to their hotel via the subway to show them a better way to get around town.

We met up this morning and went to finish the family photo shoot. Glow was a scene stealer! She had a wonderful smile for her solo shot too. We got that done, then went for Vietnamese-Korean fusion food, woellamsam, with rice wraps and vegetables. We packed them so full of food they needed to go lay down for a few hours.

My wife went about arranging a call van to take us on a trip out to the countryside tomorrow, and I took a nap with Glow to recover. American Grandma and an Aunt are coming tonight and should be here in a few hours if they don’t get lost. We’re very excited to see them. We’ve already arranged their hotel and everything too, and all we need to do is meet tomorrow to start the second leg of the trip. Complications will arise tomorrow night, as the following work week will bring about a few new classes that I can’t miss and need to be back in town to teach. Boo! Working vacation!

So far the trip has gone swimmingly. We’ve taken them around town to some of our favorite places to eat, shown them the neighborhood sights, and spent lots of time together. The pictures will be a testament to the trip. The garden and visit to the countryside should also be a lot of fun for all of us too I hope. The weather has been FANTASTIC, and everyone’s been healthy and happy to travel around town. Glow’s been a very good traveler too.

Vector graphics that could easily be resized? Stock images of superheroes? Easy to navigate and use tools to create comics? The ability to make an ENTIRE comic in PDF format and save or print it easily?! Why the hell was the Marvel’s Create Your Comic released AFTER I stopped teaching my elementary school classes?! I could have been using this in my classes for so many activities it’s ridiculous! I basically spent the entire span of middle school dreaming of being able to make comic books, and now I can just do it with a few clicks of a mouse! Gah!