Category: Teaching & Methodology

I have a little game that I invented, that I use sometimes in class when the kids are behaving well and I've run out of curriculum. It doesn't have a name, but I call it the "grammar game" just to be able to refer to it. I don't necessarily view grammar as being that central or focal for good English instruction, but I nevertheless am intrigued at how bad Korean students do at it despite English grammar being considered so focal to how Koreans are instructed in EFL.

The game is very simple. A bunch of cards with mostly random English words on them: "car" "dog" "sleeps" "sleep" "the" etc. Make a sentence in the right order using the right card, so you get "the dog sleeps" but they love to think "dog sleep" is just as acceptable. There are clear rules of grammar that say that's not the case, but they are difficult rules for Korean learners because Korean has no "the" and no verb endings to indicate subject number i.e. "-s" on "sleeps."

The game is much more "educational" than hangman, which seems to be an old standby of ill-prepared EFL teachers in Korea, such that no student has NOT heard of hangman. So I use it. And sometimes, the kids even like it. But it was nevertheless disconcerting when, running out of something to do in class today, the kids started chanting "grammar! grammar!" I mean really? Grammar? It was the game, of course. Or… the alligator bucks awarded to the eventual champion.

In other kid news, I was chatting with a 5th grade student who goes by Robin. I asked her, "Are you going over to the Tuesday class?" This fact had been in some doubt, whether she would stay in the Monday-Wednesday-Friday cohort, where she didn't fit in very well because of her strong ability, or switch to the Tuesday-Thursday cohort, where she fit in better. So I was just checking.

"Yes," she assented.

I was pleased. "That's good. That will be a great class," I added. "All the kids in there are very smart." I was paying her a sideways compliment, because she's a very smart student, indeed.

She was so smart, she recognized this compliment, and smiled. "Thank you," she said, not at all shyly.

There was another student in the classroom at that moment – a Monday cohort kid. He grinned at the two of us and our conversation, somewhat oafishly. He's not exactly the brightest bulb. He'd had no idea what we'd just been talking about. "Whaaat?" he said. It was as if he was demonstrating the implied point about the current, Monday cohort class being not-so-smart.

Robin and I exchanged a knowing glance, and we both burst out laughing. Good for her, I thought. She's going to move on to a better class.

Student: "Teacher! Are you boring?"

Me: "Yes. I am. Now go away, before I bore you more."

Student: laughing, ran away.

You see, it's quite difficult for Korean-speakers to get the difference in meaning between English pairs like "boring / bored" or "exciting / excited" because Korean adjectives describing feelings of this sort work differently, such that the same word can have both meanings. So the distinction between something or someone being bored or boring is difficult to explain.

So I welcome the opportunity to make stupid jokes of their frequently erroneous deployment of boredom-related words in particular. This was exceptional only because the student was sufficiently advanced that he recognized his mistake and got that I was making a joke.

Last night, I gave a presentation to the parents of the kids who will be moving up from elementary (6th grade) to middle school (7th grade) at the new school year – which starts in March in Korea. The curriculum undergoes major changes, both in public school and in hagwon. So the hagwon does a lot of orientation for parents of kids that move up. This is part of that. Curt spoke for over 2 hours. My bit was about 15 minutes. I’m speaking in a style that hopefully is understandable to at least a plurality of parents – slow, clearly enunciated – but there are no doubt parents that aren’t understanding my English.

In the presentation, I’m talking about my debate program – I’m trying to sell it, essentially. There is so much focus on exam-prep at the middle-school level, that a lot of the parents don’t see the benefit of a debate program or even of building speaking skills in general – there’s no speaking component to the national English exam, after all.

The video of the 3 kids’ before-and-after debating skills that I’m presenting is here, if you’re interested to look at it.

One of my regrets and frustrations about the fact that my Korean keeps failing to improve is that it limits my ability to interact with the parents of my students. This issue is sometimes “a feature, not a bug” – for example, it exempts me from the extensive telephone-calling obligation that the Korean-speaking teachers have. Nevertheless, I’d be happy to have more interaction with parents.

I got a taste last night, however, and it was pleasing (it wouldn’t always be pleasing, I’m sure, if it was “always on”). I’ve been trying a new thing: sending out video of my students’ month-end speech tests. I shoot video of the class making their little speeches, post it to youtube as “unlisted” which keeps it more-or-less private, and then use kakao, a ubiquitous Korean chat app, on my new phone, to send out links to the parents. So far, I’ve sent out video for 3 classes and it’s mostly like sending out spam into the ether with no answer or feedback. But last night one parent finally answered, and I felt a little bit happy with the result. The mom wrote:

네, 선생님. 잘보았습니다~ 덕분에 메리가 영어실력이 많이 향상외였네요. 즐거운 주말되세요.

My effort at understanding this: “Yes, teacher. Looks good~ thanks to [you] Mary’s English skills have improved a lot. Have a good weekend.” – Mary being the English nickname of the student in question.

That’s pretty awesome feedback to get. And if I was braver and more proficient in Korean, I could get more. Probably, I’d get some complaints, too. But well… it might be worth it.

I had some students in my E1 cohort design their own museums today. It went really interestingly.

One girl designed a pizza museum. It had a giant pizza, a meat section, and a vegetables section. And there was the bungee jump – it wasn’t clear how this related to the pizza.

Another girl designed a monkey museum. There was a shy monkey, a happy monkey, a crazy monkey.

A serious boy designed a rather eleborate Goguryeo museum (which he seemed to spell Khoygureo – Goguryeo is the ancient Korean kingdom from before 500 AD). I thought his drawing was the best.

But the most entertaining museum was the Karma museum. The picture wasn’t very good (below). But the girl didn’t say it was a Karma museum. She just set out to describe it, and over time, one realized that the museum was an exact simulacra of our Karma language school – there was a classroom where you could go and watch the E1 kids studying English, for example. I thought it was a little bit like a Borges story – the idea of a map exactly the size of the thing mapped.

I frequently have "if I ran the hagwon" fantasies. And I'll admit, I've been somewhat disappointed in the putative "curriculum development" aspect of my job description – both due to my own failings and and due to the lack of genuine opportunities offered to do so. The constraints on what I can do about the curriculum at "KarmaPlus" are even more constrained than under pre-merger Karma, tool

But I still think about it a lot.  Lately I've been thinking, especially, about what might be characterized as the "fun vs work" dichotomy in parental expectations.

Some parents send their kids to hagwon with the primary intention that it be mostly "fun" or that it be educational but not, per se, stressful or hard work. I'm speaking, here, mostly about elementary-age students. At middle school and high school levels, the situation is substantially different, at least here in Korea. It's mostly about raising test scores, at those levels. But at elementary levels, it's definitely the case that many parents aren't looking for an academically rigorous experience so much as a kind of enriched after-school day care.

But then there are the parents already looking for the hagwon to inculcate discipline and hard work habits and raise test scores, even at the lower grades. They get angry and feel they're not getting their money's worth when their kids don't have a lot of homework, for example.

This creates a dilemma in managing the hagwon, because you have kids from both groups side-by-side in your classroom, and you have to be aware of that. I have exactly this, every day: Kid A and Kid B didn't do their homework. Sometimes, when kids haven't done their homework, we have a custom of making  the kids "stay late" (after the end of their particular schedule of classes) to finish their homework or do some kind of extra work to make up for  the missed homework. And the problem becomes manifest when Kid A's mom complains that we're not making her stay often enough, while Kid B's mom complains that we're making her stay at all. You can see the conflict, right? It creates inequalities in how we treat different students in the classroom, that eventually the students themselves become aware of. And that leads to complaints or classroom management issues, too. Eventually, there comes a moment when  Kid A is asking me why I'm not making Kid B stay. I can't really come out and say, "well, her mom complains when I make her stay, but your mom complains when I don't make you stay."

So earlier today, after my morning debate class and waiting for a middle schooler to come see me about a missed debate speech test, I began daydreaming a solution. Here's how I think it should be solved.

The hagwon should have two parallel "tracks" – a "fun" English and an "un-fun" English. Tentatively, because it's marketing gold, I would call these "Athens" track and "Sparta" track.

The Sparta track would be about what we have now: lots of grammar, daily vocabulary tests, long, boring listening dictation work, etc.  The Athens track would be my "dream curriculum" with arts, crafts, cultural content, karaoke, etc. There would be some shared or "crossover" classes, like maybe a debate program for the advanced kids or a speech program for the lower-ability ones, to ensure everyone gets some speaking practice.

The advantage of these two parallel tracks is that kids could be placed into either track based on parental preference. Further, parents could move their kids back and forth between them, depending on changing goals or needs. And lastly, the kids themselves would be aware of the dichotomy, and there could be substantial incentives related to the possibility of being able to be "promoted" to the fun track or "demoted" to the un-fun track. It would require careful design, but I think it could be a strong selling point when parents come in to learn about the hagwon. That we have not one system, but two, enabling a more individualized style of English instruction.

Dateline: Ilsan.

…

This isn't really a blog post. This is more of a draft of some thoughts swirling in my mind about some actual blog posts that I keep thinking about writing, on the topic of the hagwon biz – my current career-for-what-it's-worth.

Alienation, factory work, unbridled capitalism in the field of education.

Parents-as-consumers, children-as-products.

The importance of counseling (상담).

Reliable curriculum vs innovative curriculum. The purpose of technology: it's marketing, not pedagogy.

Defining a market – are there customers not-worth-keeping? Do all customers have the same value?

Connection to my previous career (software): recent encounters with concepts of "slow web" or "neovictorian computing".

As I said, this is not an essay. I want to write an essay, but can't seem to get around to it. But during this very hectic day, I kept thinking about it. Watching the office dynamics play out as everyone deals with a lot of stress around the now month-old merger of two very different hagwon.

[Daily log: walking, 3 km]

I have recently reintroduced a concept I’d used successfully when I was teaching at the public school down in Yeonggwang: I give out play money (that I make myself) as incentive prizes to students who are doing exceptionally well in class (based on keeping track of points during class); later, I’ll try to run as little “store” where they can buy some trinkets like pencils or pencil cases or the like.

I have one student in a class, his name is Huitaek. He’s a little bit ADHD, maybe, and he doesn’t do really well at accumulating points. He’s actually really smart, but I can see he’s been despairing of ever earning any of my fake money. So, being innovative, he had an idea (which I reconstructed after the fact): he sold his book (his class textbook) to his neighbor. I didn’t realize at the time. But at some point I looked down, and noticed that Huitaek was sitting, bookless, happily gazing at one of my green alligator bucks that he held in his hand, while Junyeol was happily sitting with not one, but two textbooks open on his desk. Both were grinning. What had transpired was utterly transparent. (Note the image at right is out of date – it’s from the screenshot I made of the Hongnong version of my alligator bucks; I have new ones that are Karma-based.)

Fourth-grader Jeonghyeon impressed me today, because she gave me a picture of a fish school. It was impressive because this was a fairly accurate representation of something we’d talked about during my “phone-teaching” with her last Friday. It was a sign that her comprehension skills are actually improving, and it’s a credit to the phone-teaching concept. She’s a difficult student – a befuddling combination of a sunny, positive attitude and stubborn resistance to actually learning something.

Here’s her fish school.

I’m extremely tired tonight. I think I slept badly over the last several days. I’m not sure why.

[Daily log: walking, 3 km]