Placement Info: The Hamlet, Kangwon-do province

This Wednesday (2007/7/25), the 2007-08 Fulbright Korea ETAs received their placements for the upcoming "academic" year. (It's in quotes because it's the American academic year. The Korean academic year begins and ends in Winter, as I believe Japan's does.) The placements range all over the country. Many ETAs actually were placed quite close to each other. I, however, got my wish of immersive isolation. I have been placed in a rural ski resort village called Pyeongchang, which literally translated means "Window of Criticism". Fancy, huh?

The school I'll be teaching at is a Co-Ed public high school of about 337 students, of which I will actually teach close to 221, far below the expected 400-700 students I informed most of you about when you asked what I actually knew about the school I'd teach at. Like most Korean high schools, it is divided into three grades (the equivalents of Sophomore-Senior/10-12 in the States). Of these, I will only teach the lower two, as the third grade will be studying almost exclusively for their University entrance exam which will decide the rest of their life. I'm not disappointed, however. Far from it, in fact. I might actually be able to learn all of my student's names at this rate!

But I will probably not be having deep conversations with them. I had also told some of you that my students will have had close to four years of English grammar before they arrive in High School. While this will be the case at my school, all English training is geared towards the University entrance exam which is based on reading comprehension and knowledge of obscure grammar conventions. There is no speaking portion and no listening portion. (The Korean Education Dept. is trying to adjust this, but it is hard to get the older, more respected English teachers to teach spoken English as not even they can speak it.) Thus, the students take their English classes entirely in Korean, and most will have never spoken or heard a word of English. The previous ETA assigned to this school wrote the following about my students' level:

The level here is VERY LOW. As in, non-existent. They cannot produce anything so I spent a lot of time having them repeat things I said. Lessons have to be quite simple, and I always found they were too difficult. Specific advice for level and gender: The fact that they had no English at all, and that I was told to use no Korean at all. Not a whole lot of communication, and even less "conversation."

As for class management:

Boredom! Talking to kids in a language they don't understand is not fun for anyone. So naturally they talked in class, but that was it. I never encountered discipline problems beyond that. They really are perfect children by American standards.

Well, at least I won't have to worry about discipline provided there isn't a surge in gangsters in the community. I'll just keep the lessons as simple as possible. My mom used to teach Spanish using a system called TPR (Total Physical Response) which crossed story telling for word association with meaningful physical movement. It allowed me to jump from Spanish II to Spanish III at Winona Senior High School when I was no longer in her class just because of my facility with vocabulary. Hopefully, since these students have already had four years of vocabulary training, they will garner even more from it than I did. It sounds like it will mostly be a matter of getting their mouths to form the words their brains already know. We shall see.

Otherwise, I'm thinking of taking up road biking fairly seriously to keep myself occupied. The town has a population of around 3,000 people, I believe (only 46,000 in the entire county), and there will not be much to do. (Maybe by the end of the year I'll be able to participate in the Tour de France! Right...) There is, as I said, a ski resort there, so I shall have to learn I suppose. My homestay will likely be with a farming family, so I will get to help with traditional farm life, i.e. no tractors or harvesters. Everything will be done by hand or with the help of beasts of burden (the lowly ox, etc.). There is also a TaeKwonDo gym. The last ETA was able to get his black belt in a year, and perhaps I can accomplish the same.

The biggest reason I'm happy about this assignment is that I will have the opportunity to really develop my Korean speaking skills (although reading may lax quite a bit). The regional dialect is slower than the conventional dialect of Seoul (like a drawl, but I hope without the bending of vowels), so I should be able to keep up with it better than if I was placed in an urban environment. There will be no English speakers except for a handful of English teachers (and not even all of them...), so I will be forced to use my Korean. I will probably be able to get 4 day weeks, though, so if I really need to vent in English to someone, I can travel the 30 minutes by bus to the nearest "city" and visit two of the other ETAs placed the closest to me. I will probably need to do this for the first couple months as I adjust.

Incidentally, some of you may have unwittingly heard of Pyeongchang, especially if you follow the Olympic goings on fairly closely in the "off season". It was in the running to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, but lost to Russia in the final ballot.