Teaching: Week 8 (10/12)

Week 8 of teaching at the hamlet’s high school was going to prove to be quite busy. First of all, the Kangwondo Board of Education was supposed to visit sometime during the week, so everyone was a little bit on edge and running around like the chickens at my host family’s house when abeoji throws some corn out there for them to eat. (I wanted to avoid the cliché of “chickens with their heads cut off”, but chickens are all I can think of after this much writing, so give me a break.) Secondly, it was going to be my first (nearly) full week of teaching for quite some time. The past few weeks have had various interruptions so that I was never seeing my full compliment of students. Even this week I wouldn’t as it turned out that my 1-4 and 2-3 classes who I usually see without fail were cancelled, one so I could co-teach a special presentation class with Phoebe and the other so the students could have a cleaning period after the BoE’s visit. (Cultural NOTE: There are no janitors at Korean schools. The students do the cleaning. Aside from the fact that it would disemploy a lot of janitors, I think this is an excellent idea. After all, who trashes their school if they have to clean up after it?)

At any rate, the main lesson for my high school classes was a directions lesson Kiehl C., an ATE from last year, left on the program’s forum board. Essentially, it involves getting the students to generate various direction words for use during the activity (e.g. right, left, straight, turn around), as well as some movement verbs (e.g. go, stop, walk, run, dance, hop). After this, the activity is a simple game of “Where’s Waldo?” played in the entire classroom but with one caveat: the searcher is blindfolded and has to rely on the directions of the students. Sometimes, the students would be a bit sadistic in asking the blind searcher to bump into things, and I’ll admit I joined in the fun sometimes, but it was overall a good lesson. The students were able to speak English and genuinely wanted to participate in the activity. One student, who said he was sick at the beginning of class and so he couldn’t sit up front in an empty seat, miraculously got better when he saw how much fun the activity was. Amazing. Another advantage to the lesson was that, on their upcoming mock university entrance exams, I know there is going to be a listening question on directions.

As it is a new month, I’ve given the second graders an extra credit memorization assignment—Shel Silverstein’s “Whatif”. This one is much easier than last month’s Announcer’s Test as it is shorter, repetitive, and rhymes. Hopefully, I’ll have more takers than last month’s two students.

I finally saw my Advanced Adults after two and half weeks of no classes. They were well prepared on their assigned reading at least—Plato’s Allegory of Cave. We talked about that for the first half of class, and for the second half we talked about the Noseongjea Festival and Korean Language Day, which was that day, Tuesday, Oct. 9th. We even arranged a picnic for the week of no classes after the Gyeongju conference with the program. I am apparently to bring nothing, but I was able to understand their Korean enough to figure who among them was bringing what, something that seemed to surprise one of them. I told them that I was learning Korean and that I even had tutoring lessons with a Seoul Natl. University student during the weekends.

“What? You speak Korean? But what can you say? Just annyeonghaseyo.”

I proceeded to introduce myself in Korean, told them that I could order food and bus tickets, find out where the bathroom is, etc. In other words I could tell people who I was and survive. They were impressed and asked me to speak Korean with hamlet residents more often.

I was also questioned about the Korean girl I was seen walking around with at Noseonjea. That would have to be H.W., so I guess I will have to be careful about who sees me where with whom. Wouldn’t want people to get the wrong ideas…

The next day’s lesson was taken from an article in the Korean Herald, an English language newspaper, about a French-English couple who have decided to bike around the world and are currently on the Korean leg of their tour. After some discussion of the article and talking about where we’d like to travel, we decided that for next week’s class, we’d all bring in pictures of our travels and talk about them.

My beginning adults received the brunt end of my grandmother’s death I fear. I was in no mood to teach that morning, so I left the second half of class to somewhat freeform discussion, which revolved around talking about travel once again.

Besides this, the Character was also back in class. He has asked if he may attend the advanced discussion class. I told him yes, and am unsure how I feel about that. I feel like he is probably a great person to talk to one on one, but in a classroom setting he is more of a distraction than a help. He started asking about geographic features in class and would not believe me when I told him that deep could be used for both canyons and oceans, or that canyons were similar to ravines, or that the edge of a canyon was called a cliff…

A third obstacle to my teaching the beginning class on Thursday was that there was another English teacher there who came to “just watch,” but also ended up commenting on my class a bit. She was from the Philippines, which confused me at first because I knew she wasn’t Korean, but couldn’t quite place her. I was hoping to talk with her afterwards both because she is a foreigner and I’m curious as to what she’s doing in the hamlet and also so that I might share strategies with her.

At any rate, the Character ended up giving me a lecture on how Asian foreign English speakers can always understand each other, but can never understand native English speakers nor be understood by them. He also gave me a lecture on how Filipinos apparently speak English with a Spanish accent. Who knew? I, a person who roomed with a Filipino for two semesters, a Spanish minor, and someone who actually paid a great deal of attention to the colonial section of American history in H.S. certainly didn’t. Obviously, I was in no mood to be lectured about the English linguistic patterns of Asian countries, something I’m already fairly well versed in, and smiled politely while I gave him a little lecture in Spanish. To this he just smiled and said, “Yes,” making me think that he confused it for English he did not understand instead. He apparently does not listen, or else is he apparently unwilling to admit not understanding, neither of which is helpful in a conversation class.

There was no beginning adult class on Friday, but luckily my school week didn’t end on that rather sad Thursday note. I had the Kangwondo Board of Education visit to look forward to.