::A Geek in Korea::

Today was my first day of official testing. I have to admit, other than test generation, grading, and all the paper copying involved in having an exam, testing days are awesome. I handed out tests, sat in the front of class, and just read a book. Anyone that was in class had one of several versions of a test to deter cheating, and they had to return the test to me after the class along with their answer sheet. Everything was accounted for, and all they had to do was mark down the proper version of the test so that I could check it afterwards.

I learned a lot from previous testing, so I was able to finish grading, scoring, and recording in around an hour’s worth of time. This is a minor miracle, as I have tons of classwork to still calculate and tabulate for final grades. I’ll be at work for hours every day this week far beyond my normal hours trying to get everything done. I have three more classes to grade later this week, and that’s the easy part. I should be able to get most of their grade calculated by the deadline if I am tenacious about it. Some classes I could theoretically do before the grading period was even opened next week, but I need to run through the tutorial for grading and wait for the university to open up the website.

Students also get evaluations to grade me this week. I’m a little worried, because it will be brought up again in a year’s time when I go in for review to be rehired. From what I hear about contract renegotiations, you go in without a job when your contract goes up for renewal and you have to fight for your place to be reinstated with you remaining in the position. They go looking to cut anyone they can, or at least that’s how everyone that’s gone through the processes this year described it. The student reviews are something they factor into when considering your reemployment as part of your ability to keep people happy. Happy paying customers? You get to keep your job. Poor ratings leads to a poor chance of renewal. In this way it is no different than my last job. Or, it might have been I was the only person with a contact that was willing to tolerate the environment at that school for multiple years …hmmmm.

I’ve heard that most students are pretty generous with their scores and you tend to average out to be mid-range most of the time unless you get a particular class that is bitter or just falls apart for some reason. I hope this generosity is true, as my attendance has dropped off considerably this week. It might be finals and graduate school thesis defenses for some, but others might be no-shows for other reasons. I can’t believe I have to wait an entire year for that sort of feedback!

Some teachers stay in the room during the feedback survey, which seems like it would influence the results a little too much. Others take the survey afterwards to review it for tips before handing it over to the office. The official idea is that the students fill it out at home and then put it in the office so we never see their answers. It is then taken by our managers and filed away. The students do have to return the forms for someone to see.

I’d like to know what was written, but I’d also be honest and turn in all the reviews. If a student really did have something bad to say to me, I think discussing it in the office after class is always better than a passive-aggressive review at the end of a session. The simple fact that a feedback program exists, even in a detached manner such as this one is better than all other previous schools I’ve taught at in Korea. The best I could hope for in the past was a lie or a misdirected bit of criticism from a mother for their child’s poor performance usually coming from a director that has a financial gain from manipulating their words. At least here I can hear from paying customers what they thought about my performance, even if it takes a while to get back to me.

There is no going back now. We’re heading into finals week now, and I’ve got my test prepared and ready to go. My students will start taking my exam this week, and I’ve got to get them into a computer and entered into the university’s system in a few weeks time. I’ve got to be judgmental and start giving pass/fail and actual letter grades from this point out.

The other teachers have already worked out their strategies for coping with people and trying to keep the rules fair for everyone. Every time I make a decision in class I try to think about how it could be warped into an advantage for SOMEONE else. I trust my students to a point, but I’m aware that the standard of ethics in Korean universities sometimes flies right out the window. Right now I’ve given two students permission to take their exams in other classes. They were attempting to reschedule due to finals conflicts, but I gave them the option of taking them early, or miss the exam. They took the test early.

I’ve already given my rescheduled examinations already, it worked as a trial run for my testing sheet and documents. I tweaked my grading sheet and redesigned it for clarity. I already know that students are going to write on exams despite being expressly told not to, so I’ve printed off more versions of my multiple tests. Same questions, different orders. No one sitting near by each other should end up with the same test if I am lucky. Now all I have to do is keep them straight while grading them and then entering them in the computer.

The five classes I have to grade are just the start. I’ve also got to correct them, put them into the computer, then prepare all the documents related to my testing of students for their group project final. Then I have to get all those grades into the computer so that I can report a rough guess as to what their final grades will be before they leave for vacation. I don’t want to be in email contact with dozens of students asking for me to raise their grades when they leave.

Pair this with a fussy daughter, an overworked wife, a dog that is losing weight and badly needs a long walk or two due to stress, and I have a long week of work ahead of me. The end is in sight however. My evening classes will finish this week, which will free up several hours so that I can do paperwork late into the evening if need be. All I need to do this week in the meantime is figure out my secret Santa gift to get that game finished…and make sure to complete that too. Ugh. At least my lesson planning is significantly reduced this week.

Clockwords is a masterfully inventive game. Combine “Tower Defense” with “Typing as fast as humanly possible” to create a fun game. The game operates on the premise that you have a safe full of secrets you must protect. Your rival sends mechanical bugs at you, and you must shoot them with a gun by typing words.

The longer the words, the more damage you deal. The words that contain all the letters in the chamber in the “word gun” unlock more letters per turn to increase your damage. You can type anything, but the longer and the faster you type with the letters provided the more damage you will do per second, stopping the bugs. As you play, you unlock more powerful letters to load into your word gun by combining more common letters. There is a balance between striving for the most obscure words with the rarest letters, and keeping common letters around to score some points. I unlocked several levels and replayed  a few to “grind” for more powerful letters.

It’s fun in a hectic, Bookworm Adventures sort of way, but it relies on good typing skills, which I sorely lack. I think a few people in the office might enjoy this game. I’ll pass it along.

I got asked to join the office Secret Santa pool. I had luckily grabbed someone I actually know from the office, so I can stealthily build a knowledge base of things I know they like to pool ideas from for gifts through the week. While my students worked on their group projects I started planning out the different ideas for gifts related to this particular person.

I’ve got 20,000 won to spend to make the next week more entertaining. I guess I am the first person to get into the idea of this game as a week long game. When I told some people in the office that I was working on a theme for the week of gifts they got very excited by the idea. “Oh, you plan it out in advance? You know what you’ll be doing each day? You have a theme inspired by the person? I hope you have me, that sounds awesome!”

Heh heh heh.

I have no idea who has my name, and I don’t know if I’m any good at keeping a secret at all*. Two people probably already know who I am gifting simply because I’m new at this game. This is actually the first time I’ve ever been involved in an office game. Most of the time I worked with one other person, and Korean offices were never inter-personal in that way. It was all professional all the time. I was kind of disappointed about getting caught by another player before the game even really began. I’ll have to be more sneaky. I already arrive much earlier than anyone else in the office most days, so setting up stuff shouldn’t be too difficult. Next time I just need to lock a door to buy some time. Whoops!

Tomorrow I can get started thinking about a gift I know they might like. I plan to actually  hide them until I can thematically reveal them day by day without getting caught. I’ve got to secretly keep getting information about the person, while keeping under budget. Stealth! Creativity! Gift-Giving! Secrets! What is not to love?

*Shame on any of the potential coworkers that read this blog post to try to figure out who I have. Cheaters.

Way back nearly four years ago, I attended a wedding in Seoul. It was an old Korean Kindergarten teacher I used to work with that told lots of stories about her future mother-in-law. She had been dating her boyfriend for several years, but finally had to buy her  way into the family. Many Korean families exchange gifts before the wedding. I did it with my wife’s family. As long as everyone stays within their means, it is an exchange of gifts that roughly causes everyone to burn some money on stuff they wouldn’t ordinarily buy, but it’s a harmless ritual to build trust between two families. At least, it was in my case.

Our friend spend several thousand dollars on new things for her family to be before they would agree to the marriage. New furniture, new fur coats, new hanboks for the ceremony…etc. This was from a teacher with limited means. Our friend wasn’t rich, but they demanded more than a year’s salary to pay for pre-wedding gifts.

That’s not all. This was the first religious wedding I have ever attended, and the only one I’ve ever been to in an actual church. When people were on their phones at this wedding, they were actually asked to leave.. Her mother-in-law also demanded the new bride live with them for an entire year or more to “train” her daughter-in-law to take care of her son in a manner up to her demanding standard.

All this drama was agreed upon as unusual before they ever went through with the ceremony. When we finally left the wedding, we thought we’d hear amusing anecdotes about their married life for years to come as she struggled with her new family. Instead, we never heard a word from her. It’s like our friend dropped off the face of the Earth after she moved to Seoul to live with her new family.

Five years later, we have FINALLY gotten word back from our long lost friend. Indirectly, she’s contacted the outside world and we now know how her life with her husband and new family has been all this time. She called a friend of ours while her husband was away and spilled some of her gossip. We thought the bribery and scandal before the wedding was a lot, but even after they got married the mother-in-law wouldn’t let up.

For example, we’ve now heard that the mother-in-law stopped sleeping in the bedroom with her husband, and started sleeping out on the living room couch so she could hear what was going on in every room of the house. She then demanded that no one was allowed to get up to use the bathroom anymore in the middle of the night, because she didn’t want to be disturbed by any noise whatsoever, but refused to sleep in her bedroom. Our friend once bumped the makeup stand while walking around the bedroom one night. The mother-in-law then asked her the next morning, “What were you doing last night! Were you awake? Why did you bother me!”

You would think that a woman that couldn’t cut the cord for her son to sleep in peace with his own bride must have some serious issues. Perhaps she was intent on sabotaging the relationship, or wanted to get to get marriage annulled? Strangely, the mother-in-law wanted to have grandchildren. She told her daughter-in-law, “Why haven’t you given me a grandson yet? Let’s work together to get you pregnant!”

Eeeewwww!

After being berated one too many times, our friend finally convinced her husband to move out and get their own place. How did she do it? She had to provide proof of the conversations. She had to secretly tape her mother-in-law berating her before her husband would be moved to action. I don’t know if this was just because the mother-in-law denied everything, or that there was some sort of deception required to get something tape, but that was the final step to get them away from their overbearing family.

Eventually they did have a son, which must relieve our friend. Since she’s produced a son, she doesn’t need to bear any more children. The family name can be passed on.

I can’t wait to hear more stories about her time with this woman. There is finally a friend with a relative I know that is worse than one of my grating Aunts!

In one of my evening classes I had been forced to come up with proverbs on the spot when we got to a particular place in the book. I drew a blank when I was forced to think of specific sayings of wisdom. I hate being put on the spot and forced to come up with a series of interesting expressions on the spot unless it is in my wheelhouse of knowledge. I came back to class today prepared with a lot of cool proverbs. Where did I get proverbs? From a book that was almost 155 years old!

Google Books has recently become one of my favorite teaching resources. It’s got lots of very awesome texts that you can pull material from. They scanned this old book with lots of proverbs, then digitized it and put it on the internet. Because it was out of print and the rights to it had lapsed, I could use it with attribution in my class. That’s just what I did.

I grabbed all the best proverbs with longer descriptions and illustrations. Unfortunately I couldn’t use the .pdf file to extract the images, but I did get the characters to copy without retyping them all by hand with their archaic grammar and spelling. Then I built my lesson around identifying and explaining different proverbs.

The illustrated proverb book I chose has archaic rhyming poetry that explains proverbs! Yes! It’s so awesome to use in class that I was actually giddy finding different things for class to use. It is a gold mine of inside jokes. I got to use the word “bung hole” in proper context in class! How could I possibly pass on an opportunity like that?! I copy over the poetry as a hint, snag the proverb on the file I prepared, and separate them for my own list if I needed to hand out the hint sheet. I write the different proverbs on the board and ask for explanations of each.

The task of the student is to either identify the proverb from the old English poem hint if they didn’t know any of them, or use the hint and proverb to explain the lesson it teaches if they recognize the proverb when I write it on the board. Then if the students know any Korean language proverbs with the same lesson, we went over those translated in English as well. Almost all the English proverbs had a similar Korean idea too. Sometimes they lose a little in translation however.

This was a challenging, FUN, high level exercise that I did with a single student for an hour. I think with two or three more students it could be even more fun, as it would challenge them to explain and work together, and also interpret their opinions of the proverbs differently. I’ll be doing this in any high level class I teach in the future. I only pulled eight proverbs out of a 257 page book! I have dozens of other books to search too. Google Books has sped up my researching and my class planning considerably. I absolutely will take advantage of everything I ever need to research in the future with it first before I bother asking for a bunch of teaching materials from others. I can plan a more in depth bit of work at home, away from my teaching resources now because I never need to worry about having access to physical books anymore. That’s totally kick ass.

One of the teachers I work with got a nasty written note from his students indirectly. The students in question wrote to the office that manages us to complain about his class. They had complained and told the office that they liked their last teacher better. They’ve done this every time they’ve been given a new teacher. They are never satisfied. While I don’t know how one teacher might compare to another for this particular level, I do know that this teacher probably wasn’t doing a bad job.

The students I’ve had that have taken the teacher who had been criticized had nothing but glowing reviews about his teaching method. Many students talked about his class being high energy and very fun. This particular class he took over hates his style. The other teacher was a methodical, direct class that students with lower interest feel more comfortable being around. Sometimes it’s tough to live up to students expectations when being compared to others. This entire semester has been about me trying to fill the shoes of the professor before me. I sympathize entirely with a teacher having a hard time taking over for another.

This email was sitting on his desk, and it was really eating him alive. He started having those same doubts I had when I was being compared to him just last week in my class when we talked about my teaching style in a class discussion. Everything my students told me was positive and constructive, but it still rocked my confidence for the entire weekend. I told him that I knew my students in my class thought he was a good teacher, and that he shouldn’t take those whiners too seriously.

Anyway, we got talking about how you try to make classes happy, how much appeasement can you get away with before the student start trying to run the show, differences in class styles, exposure to different learning environments. That sort of thing. We both agreed that while you can listen to students to try to run a class more to their liking, never bow to what they want entirely and give them control over what happens in class. That way madness lies.

It’s always up to the teacher to call the shots and decide what is going on next, never the students. If you let students start running the show, soon you will have 15 people with different agendas trying to pull you in different directions and nothing will get accomplished. Ultimately the teacher is still responsible for what happens in class, and if you let the students just talk the entire time, or play games, or just do what they want, they’ll never make any progress in improving their language skills. As a teacher you must put people in situations that are somewhat new and challenging to allow them to try new language and think in new ways. Even when I sat down and discussed the class with the students and had them try to settle on a “perfect class”, three students all had different opinions and ideas about what needed to be done.

He basically told me that I should keep doing what I think works, and if the students have a problem they can vote with their feet. He’s got a lot more experience at higher level classes and might be comfortable with putting down his foot much sooner than I would. Maybe the students that quit my classes were doing just that. I don’t know. I think a little discussion about classes as they progress might not hurt, but I would never let a student give a veto to what I wanted to do. I’m not asking permission to move on to the next topic, or to do an activity. I’m the teacher, damn it, you listen to me.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten any harshly worded emails decrying my teaching style yet. I know the first class back after I had gotten some critique of my class style was a big confidence booster for me personally. It went really well and had everyone entertained too, but I really don’t want to start down the path of having openly hostile students like I did at my last university job. That just sucks. I’ve been very careful to try to limit any deals with students, and be consistent with everyone I meet so that no one can get leverage over me. As long as I play fair and try my hardest, I hope to hear as few complaints as possible.

Evening classes let me experiment a great deal with activities and what I want to do with classes. These students in particular are open to me trying new activities because we have class together five times a week and doing book work is boring. I discovered a new activity that I’ll use whenever I do stuff with non-verbal communication from now on. It was a lot of fun and worked well.

I handed out a sheet with 20 drawn facial expressions that weren’t labeled. We then worked on discussing the possible emotions that might be expressed with faces. We went through all of them and some students had radically different opinions on how to interpret the different expressions. It was interesting to see the little scenarios that they used to try to explain why they might feel the way they do.

Next, I handed out individual white boards for each student in the class. The students had to draw their own three or four panel comic with facial expressions, then each other student in the group would interpret them. The panels were drawn without any thought bubbles or dialog at all, and we had to guess why they had their expressions on their face. The idea was that each person had a chance to interpret the pictures their own way and explain to the class why the person that drew the picture made it that way. After everyone guessed, the person would reveal the real story.

I made a joke picture on the classroom’s white board for a sample to explain while they drew their own. I copied the expressions directly from the paper I had handed out in the class, then added Rageguy at the end. The scenario was a guy goes to the bathroom with a stomachache. He is relieved to make it without incident. He looks and realizes there is no toilet paper. Rageguy. I did my best to draw the FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU face from memory, while keeping the original face for my comic so it wasn’t out of character. I was so proud of the result.

No one in the class knew the meme and I didn’t bring it up, but the second student that guessed my comic’s scenario got it exactly right. I only drew the body, facial expressions, and a dangling bar to suggest the toilet roll. I hadn’t labeled anything or made it too easy either. They all complimented my artwork too. I like slipping jokes into my lesson. I worked the entire Barenaked Ladies song “If I had a Million Dollars” into a lesson about the future tense stuff and no one realized it. I’m too subtle for my own good.

Some of the students made comics that told a story in sequence. Others did individual pictures with a scenario behind each one. One student asked to do another activity because he couldn’t draw at all. I let him draw street signs or signs warning people of some prohibited action instead because I thought it would be easier. It was a pretty fun class to do because people were coming up with creative stories, and other people were laughing about the different artwork. The white boards made it easier to move around the room without everyone having to get up and look at the board. I’ll do this again next semester, and possibly try to integrate it with larger classes in the future.

The last class of the week, where I got to chat with students about my teaching style and learned that I should rethink my approach to classes has stuck with me. There have also been some new schedules posted, and it turned out that I did have to change my schedule next semester. Because of my new schedule my family is going to have to make some choices as to how to support ourselves and pay for our growing daughter. This new schedule won’t be in effect for a few months, but we’ll have to do something to make it work. My wife and I were discussing our options late into the evening and decided on a few options to make it better for everyone.

A few months ago, on the weekends I was so burned out from teaching children I would not like to do anything at all during the weekends. My time alone was spent doing nothing around the house. My wife would send me out while she cleaned the house by hand, and I’d walk Yoshi. Then we got the steam cleaner to make cleaning easier, Glow was born, and suddenly I had a new job. Things changed.

These days, when my wife goes out with Glow, I’m in charge of getting the house clean. I do the vacuuming. I do the steam cleaning. I walk and wash the dog. It’s basically the only time I have to myself in the house every week, and I spend it doing the little things my wife just doesn’t have time for now that we’re parents. I still don’t like to do much after I get home from work because I’m mentally fried, but on Sundays I am a cleaning machine. I have a three or four hour window where I get everything done and I really like that time now.

While I’m cleaning and working I just listen to podcasts and forget about my problems. I catch up on all my weekly programs and mentally prepare for the next week. I forget about work and just worry about the spots I miss with the steam cleaner. When I got finished with my cleaning regiment today I actually felt bad when I sat back down in front of the computer with nothing to do but post something on Twitter. I took a break and got some grammar class planning finished, but I still didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything until I had some dishes to wash sitting in the sink waiting for me.

My wife still does the majority of the housework. Laundry and childrearing while I am away most of the day is exhausting for her. Still, it was rather zen like to just focus on what needed to get done and get it done for once. So many tasks I am assigned are nuanced, subtle things I have to pick apart and ponder for a long time before I undertake them. Finding out I need a new syllabus to develop on my own for the classes I’ll be teaching in the next few months really had me down, but when I was cleaning I really could forget about it.

The most frustrating thing I’ve discovered about teaching at a University is the lack of positive, helpful feedback for my classes while I can still affect change and improve my lessons. It does no good that students have to fill out mandatory anonymous reviews of all classes at the end of the semester like this University requires for all students to see their grades. If I don’t have the information now, I can’t do anything to improve while I’m still teaching.

The main problem is that criticizing anyone older than you in a respected position to their face is not done. When I ask for questions, or need to get feedback, other professors are my main source of information. The students don’t really feel comfortable speaking their mind most of the time. In one of my classes this week there was a bit of time to talk about the class I had been teaching. Some outspoken students that were older than me were able to speak their mind. I encouraged them to share all the information they could about how I could improve my class.

They told me I have a particularly “strict” teaching style, which I assume I picked up trying to marshal 15 small unruly children into a task for an hours worth of time. If you aren’t strict, children will run all over you. I think they made a fair point that perhaps I had to rethink a few of my methods because they weren’t developed with adults in mind. I treat people like adults, and I don’t waste anyone’s time, but thinking about classes for adults and children forces you to approach a problem completely differently. I can give up a lot of control and still have a positive class. The more power I give to students to determine the topics of study and guide the conversation, the better the adult classes. I left up the lesson to the children we’d never accomplish anything. I need to have a guiding hand in the class to keep us on the right topic, but I need to develop a lighter touch.

The main thing I learned from them was that the grammar was more of a review than I had taken it for compared to classes in the past. This is not the first time these students have seen this material, and I shouldn’t treat it as such. This was eye opening. I never got to assume prior knowledge about ANYTHING with previous classes, and it was exhausted. The students by and large already know all the grammar and only need to be reminded of the rules before moving on.

They aren’t looking for anything more than a correction while they speak. The book is more a repository of speaking ideas to base a week’s lesson around, and not really a very good structure for the class other than for a reference point to the progress we’ve made so far. This was also a habit I picked up from teaching at my last school, where the entire book WAS the syllabus, and you had to teach straight from the book because you needed to be able to replicate the lesson every time dozens of time over the course of a year.

Getting the adults to speak and improve their fluency so that they may increase their test scores is what they want from me. I told them that I have teaching requirements I must cover according to a syllabus provided by the school, and that I was covering that simply because that is what I was told to do, and being the “new guy” I was never told the repercussions for following the guidelines loosely. If I could do a free talking class five nights a week with students that never needed a reminder about grammar and could use all the structures in the book perfectly, I would love to have the opportunity to do so. I was worried that if the students finished my class and didn’t end up being able to complete the assigned syllabus goals I’d have failed. They told me not to worry about it so much. Since the level process is completely foreign to me, I have no idea what actual criteria places people anywhere. I also have no guidance as to the other levels either.

The way I had built and structured the class versus what the students actually wanted was very different. I think I can take some of their criticism to heart and change a could of things, but even with a class of only three students there were contradictions in what students wanted. Some wanted an hour of unstructured chaotic madness. Others argued that free talking can isolate people that can’t talk about a certain topic due to lack of experience and can cause students to clam up. Some wanted to be called on for questions whether they were comfortable answering something or not. Others said that being called on is negative for their confidence and wanted only pair work.

I’ve been in this position before. If you try to pander to one student, you run smack up against what another student dislikes to do. There is always a compromise involved in creating a class, and the teacher has to be the dictator with the velvet glove, handling a crisis with strength and a delicate touch. I know from experience that if you don’t come in with a plan it does everyone a disservice.

Even with all the contradicting class messages and teaching styles being suggested, I learned a tremendous amount from these outspoken students that were willing to actually share feedback with me about my performance without being rude or dismissive of my questioning when I challenged their assertions about what a “perfect class” might be. They talked about classes they liked, classes they hated, and what works for them. All of the suggestions are now wracking at my confidence a little bit, seeing as how I only heard about them now, but I can use the criticism to better myself and my classes from now on.

The cool part was that the entire process was face to face and collaborative. I could talk to the people in my class and explain to them why I made the decisions I did so that I could get immediate feedback from all of them. They all saw the decisions behind my classroom structures and see why I thought I was doing the right thing each step of the way. No one dismissed my ideas, just as I didn’t dismiss any of theirs. I got my point across that I was a new professor trying to figure out my style after coming from a child-focused English education environment and transitioning into an adult-centric environment. I’m learning on the job, just trying to do my best because no one is going to take the time to steer me in the right direction. It’s a very “boot-strappy” sort of environment, no one has the time to do open classes or teaching seminars for people attempting to improve.

I’d love to have this sort of brutal assessment of my teaching with all my classes, but I don’t know if my teaching ego could take it. Going into class today I had a lot of doubts about how well I had thought through everything I had been doing up to that point at the school. Had I been making a fool of myself this entire time and no one was brave enough to tell me?

No one called my class a waste of time, no one said I was boring, or that I didn’t try hard to help them improve. They didn’t fault me for my effort, which is a relief. They just think that I can do things differently and have a greater impact if I structure things differently. I’m going to have to read the comments for my “for credit” classes too. That will be after I give grades and the students are gone for the holiday break. I’m both delighted for the opportunity to improve, and preemptively wincing about what sort of comments might be left for me.