Teaching

This last week was the first week of Camp the Program. Camp the Program is essentially an English immersion experience offered through the Program for children grades 4-9 (American system). As the description indicates, the campers are allowed ZERO Korean, something which frustrates me a little as I want to practice Korean, not English. But the immersion camp is really an ostensible purpose. The real goal is to get us ATEs some teaching experience. As such, I will have to teach two 45-minute classes (or one 90-minute team taught class and one 45-minute class, which I actually opted for), team-lead one club activity (in my case, drama club), and one "Weekend Fun" activity (Ultimate Frisbee). I've already done the team taught class and the club activity, so I'll describe those and save the rest for next week.

As I said, I team taught my first lesson. The Program required lesson plans with a specific template from me and my co-teacher (my roommate, Ray). This was a little annoying, but we got through it okay. We decided that we would teach American Tall Tales to the children. We were teaching about 8 low-intermediate level students, so we figured they'd like the stories and they'd be able to learn a lot from the visuals (a la pictures and video cribbed from YouTube.com). By the end of class, we would ask them to write down some Korean folk tales that they knew and share them with the class.

It actually turned out to be a slight disaster, but we recovered well. The students were a little lower level than we thought they would be in terms of vocabulary, so we ended up doing a LOT of clarification of ideas and vocabulary and so we were only able to get through the American Tall Tales portion. But, that ended up being a nice stopping point anyway, so we were satisfied. The Camp Instructor supervising our session said that I have a "good teaching voice" and overall presence, by which she meant it commanded respect, but was warm enough to be affirming. Somethings I need to work on: transitions, speaking slowly, and using big words, although she did note that the few times I was about to use big words, I caught myself.

Drama Club was more fun than work from my end. We basically played improv games with them. Most were pretty quiet (odd for people who volunteered for Drama Club), but the improv games sort of forced participation out of them. (For you VALPO theatre people, I led Ukaleyla for a movement/voice warmup. The campers loved it, and so did the other ATEs.)