10:40am: Woke up, did nothing
1pm: Walked 5 minutes to work
2:30pm: Ate lunch that the school paid for (we get a 5,000 won meal allowance each day)
3pm: Taught first class of six
6:15pm: Coworker’s birthday, sang and ate cake. Bell rang, no one moved. ”Didn’t the bell ring?” ”Yeah.” Everyone sat and ate more cake for five minutes.
7:45pm: Finished last class, went home
MWFs are a bit longer, but will also be easy. Thursdays are even shorter. Awesome. It’s so much more laid back then my old job, it’s unbelievable.
Training today was a lot better, I think I got the hang of it. Afterwards, another teacher-in-training (who is going to be working at my school) and I went down to observe classes and meet our fellow staff. Everyone is really cool, the school is really nice, and I think it’s going to be WAY easier than my last hagwon. Each class is only 40 minutes, and I have either 6 or 8 of them, depending on whether or not I’ll have extra classes. Either way, I don’t start teaching until 2:30, and will more than likely be done with it at 7:10. The latest would be 9. Pretty awesome.
My school this year requires a week of training for new teachers. It’s a good thing, in that this company actually cares a lot about the quality of their teachers, unlike most hagwons where they don’t care about anything as long as the parents are happy (so they can keep getting $$$). It’s also nice because I’ve never had formal training as a teacher, so I’ll take anything that will help.
BUT it sucks. Oh my god. Today, Wednesday, and Thursday are focused on going over the 8 million or so pages of material that explain the class-flow and examples of all the sections. This consists of 5 hours of mock-teaching, feedback, and having no idea what’s going on. Then Friday, we have our final mock evaluation and a test on the class structures. So when we are not sitting in a classroom, scribbling notes, and observing our peers practice teaching while they pretend we are seven-year-olds, we are preparing for the mock-teaching for the next day.
It isn’t ALL bad, though, since I’ve met a ton of awesome people and am happy getting criticism, but I absolutely cannot wait until Friday night.
