시험대비 때문에 어제부터 중학생을 가르치고 안 있어요.
Twice each semester, the hagwon shifts into 시험대비 [test prep] mode. For 3 to 4 weeks, the middle-schoolers attend classes intended to help them raise their midterm or final exam scores instead of the regular curriculum. Because these Korean middle school English tests are largely in Korean (yes, that’s the terrible truth of it), as a functionally non-Korean-speaking English teacher I’m not much help to them, so as a result, the schedule gets rearranged, and I teach only the elementary kids for several weeks.
Considering my ambivalence of a few months ago about returning to the role of middle-school teacher, I actually find myself missing the kids. I guess that’s a good sign.
Yesterday I was teaching a special story-reading class to some intermediate level elementary kids, and I’d somewhat spontaneously decided to use, as a text, Bill Peet’s The Wump World. This was one of my favorite books as a kid, myself, but as we read through the first couple of pages of this story, I realized that Peet actually uses amazingly complex language – he seems to deliberately seek out irregular verbs, unusual hyphenated adjectives, and the like. So I ended up explaing a lot to the kids. Still, I could tell they were getting into the story. At least some of them.