Teaching: Week Five

Teaching this week was an overall enjoyable experience. I picked a relatively simple lesson for my high school students (syllables), but ran into some difficulties with my adult students that I’ve had to brainstorm solutions for. This is an ongoing process. Despite my failings as an instructor, though, the students both young and old still like me (or so I’m told).

For the high school students I decided to teach syllables, as I said. There are two reasons for this, the first being that syllable usage for English in Korea is atrocious. For instance, in Korean, a bisyllabic loan word like Christmas becomes a pentasyllabic Keuriseumaseu (크리스마스). This is the actual word in the Korean language, and they think that it is English and that they know some English if they use this word. And they are right to a certain extent. A native English speaker will understand exactly what a Korean person means because we are used to brutalizing the sounds of our own language to near irrecognizability. But the reverse—that a Korean person may understand when an English speaker says, “Christmas”—is not always the case. Often, if I say a loan word to a Korean person, they won’t have a clue what I’m saying. For instance, if I say the word “love” to one of my students, I may get a blank stare, but if I say “reobeu (러브)”, there is instant comprehension. (See my situation below with the word “Serenade” in the post on my friends visiting.)

(Cultural Note: If I were to speculate on this, I would guess that it has something to do with the way written Korean works. Each ideographic box used to be a Chinese character. Thus, to change one sound in that box or to completely drop boxes from a word is to change the entire meaning of that word. Misspelling or mispronunciation can lead to huge problems in using Korean. I had a friend once (John F.) who accidentally told his cab driver that he enjoyed to eat “penis” on occasion instead of “rice porridge”. (His telling of this story still brings tears of laughter to my eyes.) To be fair, we have the same problem in English at times. My dad once accidentally prayed for “shit” instead of a “ship”. This was from the altar, mind you. Still, the incomprehensibility in Korean language is far more severe.)

The second reason (I almost forgot to include this) is that I’m trying to work my students up to writing haiku, which is a relatively simple poetry structure in any language. Last week we did emotions; this week, syllables; and in the near future, we’ll do seasons.

The lesson itself was inspired by many people in Fulbright, but I mainly used Rebecca H.’s lesson plan and adapted it to my student’s needs. The basic instruction was the same, as were the examples, but instead of having my students sing the song “Lollipop”, I played a game with them. The rules were simple. I’d write an English word on the board. They all had 30 seconds to give me the number of syllables (1 point) and the meaning of that word (1 point). For less advanced classes, they could write the meaning of the word in Korean, but if they could also write the meaning in English, they’d receive an extra point, bringing the possible total to three. To make it more comfortable for them (and honestly more convenient for record keeping), I broke them up into teams. The game went well, as did the class.

As for my adult students, I ran into trouble with both my advanced and beginning classes. As for the advanced, it seems that I may have been overzealous in my appraisal of what I can teach them. I do not mean that their English language skill is lacking in any serious way; my assessment of that is dead on. What I mean is that, though they may be able to talk about philosophy, they do not necessarily want to talk about it.

You see, on Tuesday morning, we reviewed “The Pursuit of Happyness” for the first hour, both conceptually (Is Chris Gardener a good man? Is he responsible? Is he really happy? What makes him so? Etc.) and linguistically (Why is his joke about wearing nice pants funny?). Then, for the second hour, I put one question on the board: Are humans good or evil? A can of worms indeed, but they talked about it. Then, for homework, I assigned Mencius and Hsun Tzu, two Confucian philosophers with differing points of view on the question.

Things were going grandly, or so I thought. The next morning, the first thing I hear from one of my students after the obligatory “Hello, how are you?” is “We don’t want to talk about this.” Oh. Okay…

So we talked about that for a good 20 minutes—the fact that they didn’t want to talk philosophy, and if so, what would they like to talk about. It seems that the pastor loves that I have them reading selections from Confucian classics in English. The housewives want to talk about current events, fashion, or entertainment. It’s not that the readings were hard, rather that talking about them didn’t interest them.

I told them that I brought in the more thought provoking readings because their English is at a level where I can’t just teach them grammar or basic dialogues anymore. So, I bring in a topic to talk about and we talk until they can’t find a way to express something and then we can talk about how to express that in half-way decent English. I also informed them that unless they gave me something specific to talk about, I had to go with what I was interested in talking about. It wouldn’t always be philosophy of course. After all, the first two lessons were on art and music. So, hopefully, they’ll start giving me some kind of prompt for classes. Otherwise, it’s just guesswork on my end, though I’m open to any suggestions on how to talk about the fashion industry.

Incidentally, we did end up talking about Mencius and Hsun Tzu. They had prepared for it after all and didn’t want to talk about something they hadn’t prepared for yet. For homework, I gave them Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and told them to write a page about it, just description. (After all, I had prepared it!) This actually turned out to be a decent assignment for them as I won’t see them again for about a week and a half because of Chuseok. [This absence as since turned into about two and a half weeks because midterms are the week after Chuseok and the school does not like visitors during testing.]

As for my beginning adult class, trouble might be too strong a word. At least, it was an overstatement to say that I had trouble with them this week. The trouble has been in the process of developing before my eyes, and I finally saw fit to nip it in the bud.

The aforementioned trouble is the fact that I’m dealing simultaneously with beginning students, some of whom may as well be working from an actual beginning grammar book, and intermediate students, the highest level of whom I’m tempted to ask to come to my advanced class if they weren’t translating for the beginning students half the time. How to instruct both has been a mystery, which grows more complicated when I consider that, among all of the students, there are gaps in knowledge. For instance, one student may be able to tell me where “Tom” is in a picture while another student can only point, but of these two students, the former cannot tell me what “Tom” is doing while the latter can tell me, “He is running.” Yet another gap is the typical comprehension without being able to speak. They can (mostly) understand what I’m saying, but they speak back to me through one of the intermediate students who translates their responses.

So, I’ve decided to take all of them back to square one using a book that my dad lent me from when he was teaching ESL classes at St. John’s Lutheran in Colton, California—Carlos Reyes Orozco’s English through Teamwork, which the author developed for his high school students in Mexico. That’s right. I’m using an ESL book designed for high school Hispanic students (living in Mexico, not the United States) to teach 40 year old Korean housewives. Cosmopolitanism, thy name is Desperation. The book should still work well because, though the introduction is written entirely in Spanish (which I’m relieved I can still read), the actual text of the book is entirely in English. It’s also brief. At 18 lessons and 109 pages, we should cruise through it fairly quickly since they already comprehend the language.

To keep the more intermediate students entertained, I intend to supplement this with “Survival English” in the second hour of class, meaning I’ll teach them dialogues for finding the bathroom, ordering food, etc, as well as some dialogues on how to explain Korean culture (e.g. Chuseok is like Thanksgiving because Koreans eat a lot of food on it and it happens around harvest time).

On Thursday, we finished watching “The Pursuit of Happyness”, and I assigned them five sentences answering the questions, “Is Chris Gardner happy? Why or why not?” They asked me the question, “Is writing important?” I answered yes and told them about how reading and writing are essential in the U.S. because we don’t have pictures for a lot of our signs and besides which, with text messaging and the internet (which they all use, I think, despite their age), they may be more important than before. At any rate, they turned in their homework Friday. Five sentences, but just generic sentences, not about Chris Gardner’s happiness. (Sigh…) On Friday, I also administered an assessment test since I plan to pair up less advanced students with more advanced students. It was one on one interviews, but luckily, I had a friend visiting, Lydia H., who actually taught them some fairly valuable grammar structures while I was conducting the test. She speaks Korean and was also able to explain to them my game plan for the next couple months.

Here’s hoping it works.