TB the Humdrum Teacher! Or, A Day in the Life of Teacher TB II

Back in March, I wrote about what an average day at my school was like. This was about two weeks after I arrived. You can read about it here.

For the most part it hasn’t changed all that much. I still catch the bus at 07:30, and get to school before 08:00. I still (officially) teach 22 lessons a week. But the teaching thing is a lot easier. My delusions of grandeur have been refined by the reality of classes of 35 students, many of whom can’t even read English, nevermind understand a word I’m saying. And the excitement of having a new foreign teacher has thankfully subsided. Being the centre of attention wherever you go gets old VERY quickly.

So now my days generally look like this: get into the office at 08:00. Check my emails, do some prep for classes and generally settle in for the day. Depending on the day I’ll teach two to three lessons before lunch. But, depending on the level of the students and the co-teacher, these lessons may range from real language classes, to simple vocabulary lessons, to me playing the much sought after role of walking CD-player.

Lunch happens at 12:20, and afterwards I head back to the office to do whatever admin, prep or websurfing catches my eye. Lunchtime ends at 13:10, and then we have two to three more lessons, depending on the day. I usually don’t teach more than two of these.

The normal school lessons end at 15:10, and then the kids clean the school. I still get a kick out of that, even after six months. Then I spend the rest of the day doing prep or admin or whatever, until 16:30 when I can go home. And that, as humdrum as it sounds, is pretty much an average day. Not too bad, huh?

Getting over the six-month bump

After six months of banging my head against the wall, trying to do my job properly in the face of intense resistance, things at my school have suddenly changed. Suddenly as in whiplash-Flash Gordon-endofyearbonusdisappearing suddenly. The relationship with my co-teachers has totally changed, and their attitude towards me is very different (in a good way). I’m really happy at this unexpected change, and if it keeps up the rest of the year will be really good.

There have also been some more mundane changes. The new semester started last week, and with it came a new teaching schedule. Now, instead of teaching all three grades at my middle school, I now only teach first- and second-grade students. This has made things a lot nicer, since I now see these students once a week (instead of once every two weeks in the case of the second-grade students), and the teachers have all swopped classes as well. So a teacher that formerly taught higher-level second-grade students now teaches lower-level students, and vice-versa.

What does this mean? This means I’m the only teacher that has been teaching the same students throughout the year. The other teachers all have to get to know their new students. Score! I have been able to wangle a lot more freedom with my lesson themes, and my co-teachers seem a lot more willing to let me do my thing without interference. Absolute bliss!

I don’t know how much of this is post-holiday largesse or a genuine change in attitude, but for now it is fantastic. It has coincided with a change in direction for my teaching style. My experiences on the summer camps showed me that the students are lacking some fundamentals, notably English grammar terminology. So they know what nouns and verbs are, but not what you call them in English. This makes it really hard to explain a new language point, or to explain where they are making mistakes without asking the Korean co-teacher to translate. I feel that they need to understand the English terms for parts of speech and grammar, or else they will look like fools if they ever got to an English-speaking country to learn the language.

So to get the ball rolling, I’ve started off with simple vocab building lessons, and I’ll gradually give them more difficult work as the year goes on. They understand the concepts, so it’s just showing them the English terms without making my lessons obviously grammar based.

It’s so funny to see how far my lessons and ideas have come over the past six months. I started out WAY too high, and then went WAY too low, and I’m hoping that now I’ve found a good balance. But I’ve heard from a lot of people that it takes at least six monthe before you settle into teaching. I’m glad to see that it’s true. I almost, almost feel like a real teacher. Maybe in another six months I will be a REAL teacher.

Vacation and summer camp

It’s been a long week. The students finished writing exams last week, and the vacation starts tomorrow. As you can imagine, the kids have not been that keen to do any work, so the past week or so has been a balancing act of trying to keep their attention while still doing some work. I managed to work Spongebob episodes into my lessons this week, and this was a winner. The kids enjoyed watching the show, and I was still able to teach the work I wanted by being creative with worksheets and activities. But I’m glad that’s all over!

My semester ends today (Friday), but the rest of the teachers and the students have to return tomorrow (Saturday) for some closing ceremony. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am that I don’t work Saturdays. It means I miss a two-hour long ceremony, and another obligatory school trip (also known as a piss-up). These things are ok in the beginning of the year, but to be honest I really need a break from my co-workers. I really get along with them, but I treasure my weekends and evenings. They are like gold to me! The people here really don’t understand that I’m an introvert so I really like my alone time (with my wife, of course). Here if you tell someone that you’d like to do something on your own, they ask you if you are feeling ok and if you need someone to keep you company. AARRGGHH!

The flipside of not working Saturdays, though, is that I will be spending the majority of the summer vacation at the school. Most of the other teachers will not be coming in. I have three weeks of summer camps scheduled, and then a week of preparation for next semester. I’m a little disappointed that I’ll be spending most of the summer vacation at the school, but at least I have a ten-day trip to China to break up the monotony a little. That should be amazing!

The prep for the summer camp is a little stressful. I’ll have 12 kids to look after for 4 hours a day, which is going to be pretty taxing. I have a sneaking suspicion that the kids are not going to be that keen to do anything that even looks like schoolwork. So I’ve planned several activities to keep things interesting, including our very own “English Olympics”, which is essentially a range of word games with the Olympics as the theme. I’ve also decided to teach them how to make sandwiches and coke floats. That is being reserved for the LAST lesson of one of the days. I’ll send them home all hyped up on sugar. That should be fun.

So for the next week I’ll be chanting a little rhyme to myself: “On Saturday I go to China. On Saturday I go to China…”

TB the Terrific Teacher! Or, A Day in the Life of Teacher TB

By popular demand I thought I’d write something about a typical day teaching at a middle school in Korea. By “popular demand” I mean one person asked and it seemed like a good idea. Anyway, here’s the lowdown from my few days of experience:

I catch the bus to my school every day at about 07:30, and get to school at about 07:50. Officially I don’t have to be in until about 08:20, but I find the extra 30 minutes really useful for preparing for the day, and all the other teachers are already in, so it seems only fair. They always seem quite pleased that I come in early.

Classes start at 08:50, and since I’m at a middle school they last about 45 minutes each, with ten minutes between classes. This is really short if you have a good lesson, and REALLY long if things go badly. We have about four lessons before lunch, which lasts for an hour, and then two or three lessons after lunch (depending on the day). We finish classes usually at 15:20 (though on some days at 16:10) and then the kids clean the school. Yes, that’s right, the kids clean the school. Awesome! They are usually done within 30 minutes, and then I stick around until 16:30 or 17:00, depending on how much I have to do. From next month I’ll be teaching an afterschool English class in that last hour.

I teach 22 lessons a week, so on any given day I have between four and five classes, with no more than three in a row. So far this has been fine, if a bit tiring. The trick is to do your preparation when you have breaks between classes, which is doing wonders for my time management skills. No more procrastination for me!

I’m not expected to give or mark homework, prepare or mark tests, or do any of the usual teacher stuff. All I’m meant to do is have interesting classes where the students practise their English. This is not as easy as it sounds, but I’m confident it will get easier as things go on. I’m worried about the boredom factor, since each grade has at least ten classes in it. Thus, each lesson that I prepare gets presented at least ten times. I’ve started jazzing things up in each class just to save myself from sitting through the same lesson ten times! I’m only interesting to myself up to a point.

This seems to be the norm for most public schools. However, some people teach more classes, others teach less. Some (like my wife) get their own classrooms, others (like me) don’t. At least there is some variety to this public school teacher thing!