adventures of a teacher
from central illinois
living in korea
(& traveling all over)!
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ljknight at gmail.com
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Today in my youngest class, one of our words was “log”, so I showed them the classic Ren and Stimpy Log clip. It doesn’t even matter what I show them—if it’s a video on the internet, they go crazy for it.
Any suggestions for short, silly, and child-appropriate videos to show my kids when we have down-time?
One of my students told me I look like Jessica from SNSD today.
“Thank you, but she’s Korean. I do not look Korean.”
I don’t know if it was because I was dressed Korean-y with glasses and plaid, but it’s bizarre being compared to Korean celebrities.
On another note that encompasses the general weirdness of my neighborhood, a nine-year-old, chubby, awkward male student of mine asked about my glasses today.
“Teacher, glasses Fendi?”
“Uhh, yes. How do you know?”
“My mom likes Fendi!”
I couldn’t do anything but crack up, imagining how much she has to talk about luxury brands for her odd little boy to instantly recognize their logos on his English teacher’s frames.
The same moms can also be seen forcing their children to speak English-only in the Lotte Mart (“But I want THIS candy!” Stomp, stomp, stomp, pout.), and buying their kids $300 pairs of purple Uggs that they will outgrow in six months. Samsung-dong. Ridic.
Having a computer and a projector in my classroom means I get to show stupid things like this to my students. Their reactions were pretty good.
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.
(Let me know if this video doesn’t work.)
The teacher who took over my classes made this video of some of my old kindies. I miss them! Hopefully I will be able to make it to their graduation in February.
“what a great snow man”
“abracadabra!”
“hello, sir”
“oh, shit”
oh, i love my students.
Hahaha! I miss teaching.
From Yahoo:
Buildings and houses are covered with snow in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2010. Seoul residents slogged through the heaviest snowfall in modern Korean history after a winter storm dumped more than 28 centimeters (11 inches) Monday, forcing airports to cancel flights and paralyzing traffic in South Korea’s bustling capital.
I remember always telling my students how in America, school gets cancelled a lot because of bad snow. They would get so jealous, saying that school would never get cancelled in Korea. I’m sure there were a lot of very happy kids (and teachers) this week.
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