Chapter 6: Mr. Seoul

This week's title is brought to you by Buffalo Springfield, of "For What It's Worth" and "Bluebird" fame.

This video should provide a little insight into what it's like to teach at our school. It was slightly worse because they saw my camera, but you cannot keep these kids in their chairs. They are wild. In a given week, you will be punched, kicked, bitten, pinched, drooled on, spat on, sneezed on, have your "junk" grabbed, and a korean specialty of two hands put together and shoved up your butt.

And the kids are the good part of the job!

It's really hard to have perspective on what's normal, not having seen any other schools, but from talking to other teachers this is pretty much how it goes. Despite their abundance of energy, most of the kids do make an effort to learn, and they really do soak up English at an amazing rate. And once you get used to being a combination punching bag/jungle gym for them, it's not so bad.

Far more challenging is dealing with what the director wants, and the system of the hagwon. Most frustrating is the expectation to always know what to do, even if it's come up before. In most jobs, intuition and common sense can serve as a good substitute for training, but those won't get you very far in Korea. You have to leave those at the door and just do as told.

My classload looks like this: On MWF, I teach 9 classes. On TTH I teach 8. I have a total of 22 books I use, and a total of 40 minutes a day to plan for these classes. Unfortunately, we cannot even use this time soley for planning as we have weekly and monthly reports that take up a lot of time. I don't mind reports, but these are us just typing the same thing in the book over and over again. If it were streamlined, we could just click a button and be done. But ... it's Korea.

So there isn't much time for planning. A lot of planning is necessary since the way the lessons break down the official curriculum can last less than three minutes. See below:

My actual curriculum for a 40 minute class. It doesn't last long. We play a lot of Hangman. And now Tic Tac Toe as well.

Another thing I wish I had known is that when your contract is for 12o hours a month (30 hours a week, sweet!) that means actual teaching hours. We have to be at school for 45 hours a week, minimum, and we have to mandatorily spend our lunches and breaks with the kids, but only at half pay since we're not "teaching." I think that's the Korean way, and it's not the end of the world, but it is drastically different than my expectations and maybe even how the recruiter presented it to me.

An even more significant challenge is teaching the different age groups. One group of kids, I can spend 40 minutes trying to teach them the phonics of the letter B and how to write it in upper and lower case. And it might take 2 or 3 classes before they start to mutter along with me.

My oldest group of kids, on the other hand, I get to explain things like reflexive pronouns and subject verb agreement. The thing is, they don't know terms like "verb" or "article" so how I am supposed to do that is currently beyond me.

As always, any comments, suggestions, or queries are welcome.