Teaching

Hello Everybody

Hello anybody - does anybody read my blog? (Jess as always you don’t count - oh and Eebee you rock.) Everythings instant these days - where’s the gratification in wading through my half baked blog posts, when you can watch truly random crap on youtube? Well I’ll keep writing, if only to keep a record of my years in South Korea.

So Jess and I have been extremely busy over the last while. I’ve been at the coal face preparing lessons, but I am enjoying teaching and I feel that my effort to become a good teacher is really paying off. I finally feel that I can give the students instructions without resorting to translations if I choose my language, class activities and visual cues carefully. It is so immensely satisfying to walk out of a classroom and feel that the lesson was a 100% success. I only dreamed of such feelings in my early days, and now I experience satisfaction on a regular basis.

This is not to suggest that I don’t deliver crap lessons once in a while. They still happen, but their frequency is on the wane. At least the responsibility for the success of lessons does not lie solely with me, ‘class dynamics’ play a huge role in the success of a lesson. Some groups of students will respond to just about any lesson, while others remain uninterested and unruly in lessons that the majority of other classes have responded favorably to.

I’m enjoying tapping into my creative side. It’s awesome to think of novel ideas for class, and sometimes one has to. There are very few ‘ready made stick in the microwave for five minutes’ lessons that are geared towards large classes of easily disinterested students. Stuff like ‘pair work’ is by and large a joke, it hardly ever works, within minutes it’s a jam session for the majority of the class. This said I had an awesome lesson that involved extensive pair work at my rural school today, fortunately the class that I gave the lesson to are fairly enthusiastic. My only regret is that it took to long to get the activity started, but then again I am well versed in the catastrophic results that come with turning students loose on an activity to soon.

I can’t believe some of the lessons that one finds in text books - I mean do, the authors really believe that teenage boys give a flying continental about introducing oneself at a party, or discussing one’s weekend at work? I realise they teach accurate language, and provide realistic situations - but teenagers aren’t interested in that stuff, they want excitement - they want to use their imaginations. Many of my successful lessons have been based on ‘escapism’, or ‘role-playing’ -- being different, escaping from everyday situations. Who gives a toss if the ‘coffee cup is on the table’? No ways, ‘the gold bar’, which is part of the evidence that you are trying to collect, ‘is on the table’ is soooo much more interesting.

Yesterday I started teaching ‘Africa v2’, that’s right I’ve incorporated some general knowledge into my classes, ‘Africa v1’ was overly ambitious and flopped so I scrapped it after the first lesson. The second lesson is a quiz and is proving successful. The students have time to go through cards that I have prepared before the quiz starts - the only thing is I really didn’t think the cards through very well before diving into preparing them. Each card consists of 3 pieces of paper, each group has 17 cards and there are 6 groups. So 3 X pieces of paper X 17 cards X 6 groups = 306 pieces of paper that need to be cut and glued together = the weekend totally wasted. So now I am laminating the cards as I can just see some little shit scribbling on the cards, drawing phallic symbols, writing stuff, adding horns etc.

If I only I had spent a little more time in the planning stage, I would not have spent nearly as long preparing the materials. Oh well, lesson relearned.

Au revoir great vacuum of the internet.

Comment folk, comment!