Category: Banalities & Journaling

Some of my students have learned of my "hobby" of writing poetry. Hence the following exchange.

Setting: Advanced 8th Grade Speaking class.

Teacher: "Are you ready?"

Student: "Please give five more minutes to prepare the answer."

Teacher: "I'm tired of waiting… it's boring when you guys take so long getting ready to answer the question."

Student: "Just do some work. Or write a poem or something."

[daily log: walking, 7km]

I had a rather bad day yesterday. 

I do fine when the kids are behaving well, but I have some issues with consistency when they behave badly. I vacillate between two approaches. One is a kind of laissez-faire approach where I try to show kindness and broad tolerance for minor infractions of classroom rules (e.g. speaking out of turn, having "off channel" conversations with friends, getting up and moving about). The other is to be fairly rigid about it, and "exile" students (ask them to leave the classroom and go sit at the front desk for a time out) who misbehave repeatedly.

My dreaded, worst situation, however, are those times when I ask students to leave the classroom, and they simply refuse. They sit like a stone and do nothing. That turns into a showdown, which always leaves me with an awkward situation. Do I forcibly remove the child, so as to be consistently applying my "exile" rule? Or do I back down and try to take a different approach, which makes me inconsistent and where I worry the kids take the lesson that I can be "out-waited"? 

It's a horrible situation, that simply seems to have no good solution. And I'm not consistent in how I deal with it, either. So I just feel like a really crappy, inconsistent teacher when these situations arise.

And then after dealing with it, in whatever way I did, I feel guilty that I did the wrong thing, afterward.

It's depressing.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

I have this one middle-school cohort which as been losing students. It is now down to exactly two.

Both the remaining students are morbidly shy 8th grade girls. They are afraid to talk – not just in English: their Korean teachers report that they are just as wordless in Korean. They simply don't want to talk. This kind of painful shyness is not uncommon in Korean students, but generally I don't see it in middle-schoolers because it's rare for such shy kids to make it to the advanced levels.

They will sit and shake their heads or nod – no or yes. Sometimes they will point to what they've written in their book or on whatever worksheet. They're not stupid, and their other English skills are not poor – after all, they placed into my class, and I only teach advanced middle-schoolers. But the placement test has no speaking component.

One girl in particular, Eunjae, has excellent listening skills, and she frequently makes these wry smiles or even laughs (silently) at some joking thing or another that I might say, in my never-ending classroom "teacher-patter."

I have been struggling to figure out ways to move forward in getting them to speak. Either that, or give up on the speaking component of my course and just work to their strengths – comprehension and grammar. Those are the strengths that serve them best for the Korean exams, anyway, so I really can't begrudge them that. The only constraint is that they are ostensibly enrolled in a TOEFL cohort, which is supposed to include the "4 skills" (reading / listening / speaking / writing). I've discussed with their home teacher that I might alter the curriculum. 

Last night, we had a listening class, but even that is a little bit hard with two mutes. There was a section in our book where they had to make a decision between two possible interpretations, which were to the left and right on the page. So I innovated, and wrote "Choice 1" and "Choice 2" on the extreme left and right of the board, and told them to point. They seemed to find this vaguely entertaining. 

But when we got to a section where they had to actually say some words they heard, it was difficult. I kind of hammed my way through. Eunjae actually whispered a few answers, for those cases where she felt very confident. I would lean close, and she would whisper, and I would repeat it, and make a big deal of the fact she'd done that.

Eunjae was wearing one of those heavy, long, black, quilted nylon winter coats that are so much in vogue right now with Korean youth (they all look like contemporary Chicago gangsters on a winter's day). She shifted in her seat, and her movement rustled the coat. The sound of the coat drowned out her voice completely.

I said, somewhat wryly, "Eunjae! Wow! Your coat is louder than you are." 

She burst out laughing. Genuine laughter. She dropped her face to the desk in embarrassment, but when she looked up, she was still smiling. "It's OK," I added, in reassurance. "Just sit still when you talk." 

Small steps, right? 

[daily log, walking, 7km]

By “collateralized,” I’m referring to the concept of “marketing collateral,” a concept I became familiar with in my years working at Paradise Corporation (my private pseudonym for ARAMARK). For a person to be collateralized means for a person to be used for marketing purposes, I guess. I have been “collateralized” twice before, in 2009 at LBridge, and in 2012 at Karma. So recently Curt hired a new marketing service for his hagwon, and a very dorky picture of me was used in some newpaper advertising copy.

One of my students saw it and gravely shook her head, saying, “Don’t be too proud of that picture, teacher.”

I’m inclined to agree. I look like a doofus with an alligator fetish. Maybe that’s not so far from the truth.

Here is a scan of the newspaper page in question – it’s one of those local newspaper advertising circulars that are one of the most common ways for hagwon to adverstise.

[daily log: walking, 7km]