Category: Teaching & Methodology

My student Ahyeon was angry at me today. But unlike most elementary students, instead of acting out, she approached her anger in an unusual way: she ignored the class proceedings for about 20 minutes (I could tell she was angry – it was about some issue related to the awarding of points on homework), and spent the time carefully making a “black card” for me (picture at right), which she presented to me with a shy smile at the end of class. It was very unusual, but I was pleased with it, in a strange way. It was so communicative – which as a language teacher, is much more valuable than the content of the communication, if that makes any sense.

– Notes for Korean –
냄새 [naem-sae] – smell (I was excited to learn this word from context based on overhearing someone talking – that’s so unusual, and it’s a much, much better way to learn vocabulary than repeatedly trying to memorize it)
두음법칙 [du-eum-beop-chik] – liaison (initial sound-[change] rules)

[Daily log: walking 7 km; running 1 km]

So it's official, now – the letters went out to parents today, so they can't really go changing  their minds, at this point. My current place of employment, Karma Academy, is merging with Woongjin Plus, which just happens to be the company that took over and eventually renamed my former employer, LBridge, affectionately known as "hellbridge" to some of its workers. Overall, there were a lot of things I liked about LBridge, so I don't see this as necessarily apocalyptic – and one of the things I liked least about LBridge was the management, which will have changed twice over by the time I'm back there again next month. My current boss, Curt, will be in charge. I wonder though, at how this will work out. There are a lot of "I wonders" now.

I'm going to keep an open mind. Given the current market conditions, mergers are one of the few ways a hagwon can grow. So I understand the business rationale. But why this specific marriage? – two hagwon could hardly be more mis-matched, from a business culture standpoint. That's actually the point, as a conversation with my boss last night underscored. Perhaps both can grow and improve through cross-fertilization.

The title to this blog post is rather alarmist. But I'm not really expecting a return to the dark days of 2008. And as I said, there were a lot of things I really liked about LBridge – especially the rigid curriculum. Karma could use some structure, in that area. I had a moment of schadenfreude during a "training presentation" yesterday, when a powerpoint slide on a means of evaluating student writing was flashed on the screen that bore clear markings of being the descendant of the speech and writing scoring schema I developed while at LBrdige and had happily turned over to the curriculum designer (who's long-gone, now, but the earmarks of her work are everywhere). That weird feeling that you've left actual traces of your work at an organization that you've long left behind, but now, returning, there it is. "I made that," I wanted to say. I refrained.

[Daily log: walking, 4 km]

Because today was the last day of regular class for the middle-schoolers (due to upcoming test-prep time, again – AGAIN!), we played some games in the “good” classes.

We were playing a version of the mafia game (a commercial version called Lupus in Tabula, Korean edition), which requires that the students dissumlate or “act” as I call it. They have to pretend they are not the ware-wolf, or pretend to know who the wolf is, etc.

After getting “killed” several times early in the game, one girl said, “I think I’m a good actor, but I think I’m not.” This was terribly funny, for some reason. It was pretty accurate, too – her confidence on how to the play the game was outstripping her “poker face.”

Anyway, it was fun. And now I will miss the middle schoolers, again.

[Daily log: walking, 3 km]

My student Jeonghyeon isn’t the most intellectual. The elementary third grader has a reputation for not ever even having mastered English phonics, for example. But today she gave me a picture – of a kangaroo eating “flower ice cream” that shows clear evidence of having understood the principles of phonics – look how she’s decided to spell out her title, at the top: “forow iscrime.” This shows some awareness, at least, of how English phonics works – it’s not just a random agglomeration of letters, which I’ve known some students at her level of ability (including her, in the past) to do with any vocabulary they haven’t memorized.

Today was “Teacher’s Day.” I’m not sure what this day is supposed to be for – unlike children during “Children’s Day,” teachers on Teacher’s Day don’t get the day off and no one takes them to the park. But I did get a few stray gifts from well-meaning students (or perhaps from the kids of well-meaning parents), including this pink box of Japanese sweets (well, I assume they’re either Japanese or Japanese-style, since there’s Japanese on the label).

[Daily log: walking, 3 km; running, 4 km]

We were giving a month-end test today. I was giving a listening test to a group of 7th graders, and one student, who I know has moderately high ability but who is stunningly lazy about studying or doing homework, stared at me during the entire time of the test.

Here's what's weird. He got the high score – by a great deal: 97%. And I had this weird feeling that he was somehow watching me, as we listened to the listening test, and was somehow reading my facial expressions or gestures to determine the answers. I think of myself as keeping a "straight" face during these tests, because I know that sometimes it is possible for a teacher to "give away" answers during a listening test in how they react to the possible answers given. But really… am I giving away the answers in some transparent way? Some tic or something?

Well, who knows? Should I ask him? Is it cheating? It's unconventional… to be certain. I should sit in the back of the class, maybe, next time, and see how he does.

I had a bad, bad day. On top of a pretty crappy week.

I've been feeling really lousy about my teaching ability. And today, I got in an argument with my boss. Nominally, it was about the fact that I have this very low-ability 6th grader who has been placed into a class of slightly higher-ability 2nd through 4th graders. My concern is that – given Korean social dynamics, especially – he's setting a really bad example to the younger students. And frankly, I personally have no idea how to control him, or what to do with him.

But it turned into an argument about me complaining "all the time." I don't think I complain all the time. So that made me angry, that he would accuse me of that. And then the last straw was when my boss said something to the effect of, "well, it's the job of a good teacher to manage this kind of situation." The obvious implication was that, in complaining about this situation and insisting it was insoluable within the classroom, I was… a bad teacher.

This is not something I take well, even on good days. But in the light of my recent insecurities regarding my teaching, it was a brutally unpleasant blow.

I've been toying with the possibility that I may not renew at Karma, despite everything I've said in the past, and despite my intense desire to remain in Korea. This was a further nudge in that direction. Leaving Karma would be a big decision, not to be made on a whim. I have to realize that, all said and done, it's the best job I've had since coming to Korea, and one of the best jobs I've had, in general. It's really mostly my own insecurities, along with my frustration with a feeling of "stasis" in the non-work-aspects of my life, that are driving this desire… this restlessness.

It's not a restlessness to travel. Even a year after I made a renewed commitment, last March, to never "travel" alone, again (in the touristic sense, I mean), I'm still steadfastly uninterested in being a wanderer, anymore. I have a huge level of a weird kind of comfort with my corner of the world, and if I were to leave Karma, that corner would be hugely destabilized – I can't say I would feel anything but dread about that. It would probably result in my returning to the US, because if I can't be satisfied with the "best job" in Korea, my prospects for other Korean jobs would be quite poor. Returning to the US has about the same level of appeal for me as entering a mental hospital – given the US media's self-portrait, as seen from here, my home-country is going patently off the deep end.

The fact is, though… I'm becoming painfully disillusioned with respect to my teaching ability, these days. I like teaching. I love the children, I get so much from them. But if I can't be a decent teacher, then… for everyone's good, I should get out of it.

My students were writing essays in my RN2T cohort. When I have them write, I have no problem allowing them to use dictionaries – I will be going through and correcting their writing with them, anyway, and I think it can be valuable because it encourages them to be more creative with language, which in turn allows them to become more engaged in the learning process.

Allowing them dictionaries in this day and age means allowing them to pull out their cell phones – that’s where the dictionary apps live, along with online (internet) dictionaries and such like. I don’t have hang ups about this. It’s part of the world as it is, today.

One student, Hojin, had his phone out and was grinning at it.

I said you could use your phones for dictionaries,” I said to him – “Not to surf the internet or play games.”

“Teacher!” he objected. He turned the screen away so I couldn’t see it. Then, thinking… “How did you know?”

“No one smiles when they’re using the dictionary, Hojin,” I explained, sardonically.

“Oh. You’re so clever!” He laughed. And he put his phone away.

Last night in my debate class with the TP2 cohort we had a "practice debate" (they give speeches but with explicit reassurance that I'm not grading them – they actually do better on these speeches than on the graded ones). Our current topic is the space program – trying to decide if the US and/or Korea should end or continue their respective space programs. They seem really interested and engaged in the topic, despite their complaints of it being too hard. Sometimes I have to just pay attention to their level of engagement and ignore the verbal content of their complaining.

Anyway, the class has recently shrunk a lot – half of them were 9th-graders who have "graduated" middle school and will be starting high-school level hagwon in January, which means no debate (god forbid anything resembling a communicative-based curriculum for high-schoolers!). The consequence of this is that I don't have enough students to have an effective "team-style" debate – I had three kids last night.

When this happens, I make the students in the class one team, while I become the other "team" and play the various roles in the opposing team. This can seem monotonous, but I actually enjoy it – it gives me a chance to model all kinds of debate strategies and speech modes to the kids. To make it more interesting, I sometimes allow the various roles in my team to be different "people" or personalities. 

Last night, I was a team made up of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. We were tasked with supporting the U.S. space program, while the students were tasked with shutting it down. They did admirably, but I was quite interested in their reactions to my efforts to "channel" the various presidents. I'm sure I'm not actually very good at this, but they seemed pleased with how "different" each of them were, so I was channeling something.

Being Kennedy was hard, because I don't really know him the way I "know" the others – he predates me too much. But I made his rhetoric wide-reaching and inspirational, while I made Reagan slower, more "old" (obviously), but I think my Reagan sounded more like Lee Myeong Bak (if he were speaking English). Or maybe John McCain. Clinton came really easily – I can do the folksy Arkansas accent, passably, too. Obama… I was just my dad – I've observed before in this blog that Obama seems to have the same exact personality as my father (though with less of the dysfunction, perhaps, and more ambition).

The kids said afterward that my Kennedy was best, and Obama was most boring. I think this may be accurate, actually.

Teaching is important. I found this interesting article reflecting on new reasons why.

I've been feeling kind of inadequate as a teacher, lately. And a little bit rudderless as to how to improve. I have good classes and bad ones, good days and bad ones, but how much I plan or prepare for any given day or lesson seems utterly unrelated to whether they go well or badly. So what's going on?

Today, little Jinyong had  paper cup of green tea, to which he had added a square of chocolate – as only an innovative 7 year old can do – he called it "choco-cha." Then, somehow, this concoction ended up on the floor of my classroom. The hectic process of cleaning this up discombubulated the routine, and I never recovered my stride. It was a terrible class.

Well, anyway.

Teaching first graders is so often an utterly hit-or-miss proposition. I’ll come up with a game or lesson plan that I think is a good idea, and it will be a flop. I’ll be improvising, and suddenly have the best class ever.

Recently, with my Tuesday kids, I found an unexpected hit with the video and song, below. I had showed them a different youtube video, and they saw the icon for the little skeleton down in the corner, and were saying “해골 해골” [“skeleton skeleton”]. So I followed the link – maybe it was a good song?

Maybe they’d seen it in school or something. We watched video (and watched it again, and again, and again, because that’s how it is with first-graders), and the look of concentration as they tried to follow along and say the words to the song was precious.

I had kind of a hard, depressing day at work yesterday. I had slept badly. I really hate sleeping with the air conditioner running, as it makes the air feel stale in my little apartment (not to mention driving up the electric bill, and setting aside the fact that Koreans would tell me that it’s lethally dangerous – this is a strong cultural belief they hold) – but when I try to sleep with my window open, these horrible swarms of mosquitoes that live in the swampy between-buildings-place under my window invade and chomp on my blood.

So I woke up at around 3 am yesterday morning, chompified, and slammed my window shut and hunted mosquitoes for a while, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. Because of the way the window opens (a sort of angle out tilt-opening window), a screen wouldn’t work even if it tried to have one.

So later I got to work, feeling tired out and under-rested.

I have some new classes, in new formats, because of the “test prep schedule” (see previous blog post).  I wanted to try to prepare for those some more.  Karma hagwon calls them “CC” classes, and I don’t even know what this acronym is supposed to stand for, but they’re meant to be multi-media classes where we watch, listen to and shadow various audio-visual stuff: news presentations, movies, pop-song music videos, etc.

I am of two minds of this type of thing. I think it can be very useful, and the kids get into it, as they do anything audio-visual and computer-based. But Korean classrooms (especially hagwon) have such low standards of technology infrastructure that wrestling with the hardware and software is often much, much more trouble than it’s worth. Very often when teaching at Hongnong, and even more at LinguaForum and LBridge before that, any time I get stuck using technology in a Korean classroom, I soon find myself fantasizing that my next teaching job will involve a dirt-floored classroom with only a blackboard, somewhere in India.

So messing with the technology for this CC class put me in a grumpy mood.

Then, my boss kind of blew up at me over the fact that some mom called and complained that her kid was having too much fun in my class. I’ve written about this many times before – there is a major subclass of Korean parents who believe that if their kids are having fun in hagwon, they’re not learning anything. It’s a difficult demographic to please, obviously, especially given my own methodological predelictions.

There’s never an easy answer to these things, but having him bitch at me about it really ticked me off. He knows how I think about it, and I think at heart, he agrees – I know he does, because that’s why I wanted to work for him. But there’s a lot of pressure on hagwon owners to please the parents, and as a businessman, that’s only logical. So, net result…  we have to figure out how to make little Jinmo a little less happy in his phonics class – give him a little extra homework, yell at him, a little bit. So sad… The parents are our customers, and “the customer is always right,” right?

So if the CC technology made me grumpy, my boss’s little parentally-induced tantrum had me fuming.  Not your typical day at hagwon.  And my “frontloaded” schedule – with no middle-schoolers – meant that I didn’t have any later evening classes to escape into to cheer me up again.  I just sat fuming at my desk, waiting for closing time and trying to do something productive on my debate textbook project (which had been in stasis for most of August). 

But then a middle-school student named Wonjun poked his head into the otherwise vacant staff room, and said, in a quiet, forlorn voice, “Hi teacher.”  Gloomily.  The test-prep classes aren’t much fun, I know.

“Wonjun-a!  What’s up?” I said, with that false cheerfulness I’ve learned so well since becoming a teacher. 

“I miss you,” he said, grinning.

[Picture above – Van Gogh’s “Pont de l’Anglois”]