I'm doing a bit of relaxing and listening to music in my apartment after making the rather lengthy trek to E-mart (which is basically a huge Wal-Mart type store) in order to secure important taco-making ingredients, so I figured I'd put up another blog post now that I've spent a week actually teaching students at work.
My schedule is set up so that my heaviest class loads are Monday and Friday, with one fewer class (i.e. a longer dinner break) Tuesday and Thursday, and Wednesday I actually have more break time than class time so I figure I'll get a lot of reading in on Wednesdays.
There are essentially two levels of students: younger kids typically work with the Herald School official ESL books and learn simple vocabulary, grammar and eventually sentence structure. There are four books in different colors for each class: two homework books and two in-class books. Some of these kids have quite limited English skills so it can be kind of tough to try to explain what new words mean. As an example I had a group of kids who were learning about ages and grades in school and they simply weren't grasping the concept of grades until I pulled out my phone and Google translated it for them. Apparently I'm not supposed to take my phone to class so that tool won't be of any use to me in the future, unfortunately. These younger kids range from giving you dead-eyed stares of confusion to being completely unable to sit still for more than three or four seconds at a time - I've got one class where there are two little Bart Simpsons who constantly mock fight one another and run around and pull all of the little Milhouses into their antics. Gonna have to lay down the law on those kids, I think.
Older kids have longer textbooks that sometimes have fairly long stories, essays and articles that they read, then pages that guide them through sentence writing and eventually full-blown page-long essays. All of those hyperactive younger kids are the earlier classes in the day, so it's actually really nice and relaxing to end the day with the more advanced students who are learning more interesting material and who have English skills strong enough to carry on some pretty complex conversations. They also generally seem really interested in learning about America and American culture, and equally interested in what I know about Korea and its culture and how I like certain things here. They were all extremely impressed that I ate that spicy ramen, for example, and whenever I say one of the few Korean phrases I know they all seem astonished, which is really funny.
Though I've only been here a week, I have gotten a little taste of just how rewarding it can be actually teaching something useful to kids. Watching kids shift from total ignorance of a subject to fully grasping its intricacies is really pretty great and rewarding, and I expect that over the course of a year it's going to continue to be that way, perhaps even moreso as I get into the swing of the pace of teaching the material and can take advantage of extra class time to slip in some lessons that I feel are useful but aren't tied to the strict coursework I've been assigned to teach and which, oftentimes, feels sort of shitty in terms of actual educational value. Honestly I can say that this is the most rewarding and constructive job I've ever had and after doing this for a few years I think I'd have a hell of a time going back to some pointless cubicle jockey job staring at spreadsheets.
I've also gotten to know some of my coworkers a little better. The Korean teachers are all nice but seem a bit insular or otherwise not too interested in socializing with the foreign teachers for a variety of reasons (one's a married woman with a baby on the way, another simply has a long commute in to work so wants to head straight home after, etc.). Two of my foreign co-teachers took me to the bar down the street the other day for "a couple of drinks" which of course turned into many pints, a huge platter of sausage, loads of free nachos and some sort of little Korean bar munchies and several rounds of Jim Beam on the house. I went back last night with the other male foreign teacher and we didn't get nearly as much free stuff so I put that on the English girl being the source of freebies from the bartender. It's a nice little hangout though with lots of friendly drunk middle-aged Korean guys trying to chat with us. Neat to find something in the neighborhood that's social/entertaining.
Between the pleasantness of the job itself and the general coolness of the people I work with, I think I'm going to have a really good year here. One of the teachers I've hung out with is actually due to end her contract and head back to England around the end of the month, so here's hoping that whoever the school hires to replace her is someone I can get along with at least.
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