On Monday, my sister asked me to blog. Actually, I think it was phrased more like “blog already!”.
The short answer is that I’m pretty busy these days. This week has been tipped towards the “busier” end of the scale, with a bonus Korean class on Monday and a staff dinner last night (more on that later). I’m keeping up, but for various reasons, I’m not planning to continue teaching parent class – a five hour commitment every week (including planning and meetings). It’s been pretty fun, but I find myself planning lessons at home and dragging myself to Korean class too tired to focus.
Things will change soon, though. One of the big advertised perks of being an elementary school teach is all that vacation, where there are no kids at school. Now, as anyone in the school system knows, just because there are no kids doesn’t mean the teachers don’t have to be there, but vacation times still mean a lot of down time when you can travel, take courses to upgrade your skills, or just chill at home.
On Monday, when I was going to write this, I had a very vague idea of what my vacation looked like. The last day of classes is December 18, after which I would be free of commitments until January 4. The school board has planned English Immersion Camps for all us Gwangju EPIK teachers to teach at from January 4 – 15. It’s four hours a day of teaching some kind of lessons to fifth and sixth grade students. In a gesture of appreciation, the Office of Education offered to give us a way (with some paperwork) to get a bonus of about 700,000 won. And after that, with no students or teachers at school, I would be off the rest of January. In February, we have two weeks of school – but no English classes, so it’s deskwarming for me – and then two more weeks of “spring vacation”. No one understands this system.
So, in summary, I was off Dec 18 – Jan 4, Jan 16 – Feb 2, and then two more weeks in February. Pretty nice. Then, yesterday and today, things swerved sharply offcourse.
First, the good news: I’ll be finishing teaching classes at my main school next Friday. After that, it’s deskwarming time (though I’m not sure what I’ll be doing in my little school). A little boring, but whatever.
And I’m being “asked” to attend a training course for EIC on December 11 and 12, at a spa in Naju. While it’s nice to go to spas on a work day, it appears that it will be lectures all day. Unless we are getting lectured at in a sauna, I feel like it’s kind of a waste of a spa trip, myself. Also, being voluntold to attend a work event on a Saturday is kind of crappy, especially when I was supposed to go to my first Korean wedding that day. Still, spa, I guess.
Oddly, my other commitments aren’t winding down when my school does. At the moment – though I expect reschedulings – I have parent class and Korean class on Christmas Eve, and my final parent class on New Year’s Eve. Which is just… crap. I’m not sure how I’m going to spend my first Christmas Eve away from home, but it’s bloody well not going to be conjugating verbs.
And then the big ouches. We were informed today that we aren’t actually going to get that 700,000 won. The people above our Office of Education have decreed thus, and so it shall be. Now, I do get paid as normal, but without the extra money, we won’t be doing any travelling over the break, except possibly a trip to Seoul. I suppose that would be more devastating if not for my second piece of news – my vice principal told my coteacher that, because they are allowing me to go to EIC (which is mandatory), I have to come to work for the rest of January. With no students or other teachers.
I’m pretty bummed about all this. I realize it’s a first world problem – I mean, I’m still getting paid, and sitting at a desk all day with nothing to do is boring, but it’s not really a disaster. On the other hand, I’m not feeling like a prized asset of the Korean school system at the moment. Having to come in and deskwarm while the rest of the staff aren’t here feels like pure spite – and I’ll already be sitting here “taking a rest” for two weeks in December and two more in February. And the given reason is a camp that is outside my regular job description, that I’m giving up a weekend to train for (unpaid overtime), and the bonus for the camp has just been revoked.
I’m working through it, but right now the most optimistic thing I can do is make a list of all the things I can do with six weeks of sitting at my desk. Writing a novel, knitting a sweater, and rewriting the entire grade five and six roleplay curriculum are heading up the list at the moment. Any suggestions?
Filed under: teachering
I expect that it’s pretty frustrating to be an English teacher in Korea who is in charge of designing curriculum. You’ve mastered the English subjunctive, you have more vocabulary than most American high school graduates, you avoid dangling your participles – and then they come to you and say, by the way, we’re trying to look globalized, here. Throw in some cultural lessons, how hard can it be.
And because you like your job, you try to think of something cultural for a chapter about would you/don’t. Hey, this chapter is towards the end of the book, it’ll be around November – isn’t Thanksgiving around that time? Alright, Thanksgiving it is. Would you come to my house for Thanksgiving? This stuff practically writes itself.
And then some bright committee member says, hey, we need to fit in “don’t”… how about we have a Korean character try to take off their shoes when they come into the house, and then the American can say, “Don’t take off your shoes! We don’t take off our shoes in the house.” And you think, well, that seems kind of weird, but… I guess we never see them take off their shoes on Friends. Oh, that wacky Joey!
And just like that, an entire culturally significant chapter. OR IS IT?
Moving past the quality of acting (?), dubbing (??) and editing (???), how many people do you know who insist that shoes stay on in their house? Because… I can’t say I know many. It doesn’t make sense – most people like their floors, or at least don’t like cleaning them over and over.
It would be easy to glide past it, except that it comes up over and over, in the dialogues and even the song. The lyrics go:
Don’t take off your shoes
Don’t take off your shoes
We don’t take off our shoes in the house
Tra la la, Tra la la la la la!
My coteacher brought it up to me as a possible problem, as he was pretty sure it didn’t make sense. I’m going to try to gloss over it as much as I can – something like: Ann doesn’t take off her shoes at her house, it’s a rule at Ann’s house. At my house, it’s “don’t let out the cat, we don’t let the cat out of the house”. Hopefully, this will help their understand of the “don’t” construction, rather than confusing them.
I know many other teachers just don’t use the lesson, but my coteachers are pretty fond of sticking to the textbook material, as the kids do get tested on the content. Hopefully, the next time they redo the curriculum (rumoured to be sooner rather than later) they’ll replace some of the “cultural insights” with more relevant ones. That are true. That would be nice.
During October, though I wasn’t blogging much, I did take a lot of pictures. We take pictures of trips, and a lot of pictures of food – definitely food-centric people, here – but every now and again we snap a random picture of things going on.
My, what a vine! It seems to be eating the building… and the tree next to it… what kind of vine would do that…?
enhance!
And you thought your zucchini were aggressive.
The next picture comes from Nongseong, close to the bus terminal. It’s in an alley, and has been making me think since I first saw it. You see, Korean restaurants have a habit of putting up large images of the animal they serve – happy pigs mean they do pork barbecue, cute ducklings means they serve duck. It’s a little weird, but reasonable I guess. So here’s a fairly typical “we serve happy cows” poster, with a twist:
... and cocker spaniels?
Now, I know that Koreans don’t eat pedigreed dogs, but still… odd.
hot peppers and salad greens
It’s hard to get across how little wasted space there is, even in our neighbourhood, which is pretty far from downtown. This is a little patch of space between an apartment complex and what appears to be a police box. Taken on October 10; they have since planted and raised some onions in that space.
seriously, would you ever see this in Canada? Eat your heart out, Tyler Durden.
Grain, drying in the sun. This is on a pretty peaceful road on our walk home from the subway, but for about two weeks there were tarps laid out on lots of roadsides, drying grain like this – on the six lane road to my big school, and on the narrow back road to my little school. No one messes with it. I didn’t even see birds eating it.
i haz room with a view
This cat hangs out in our neighbourhood. He’s not actually a street cat; if you look closely, you can see his collar. Every now and again we see him hanging out on our neighbour’s room. I expect he lives pretty well on the fieldmice around our place. Oh, and the garbage. That too.
Finally: some of the produce from said field. This picture is from yesterday (Sunday) morning – they’re still growing greens in the field and it’s mid November. The big white things are giant radishes; we are likely looking at kimchi-to-be.
If you recall, when I moved to Gwangju, I was presented with a large room that had a bed, a wardrobe, a TV, a table, a pair of chairs, and Hideous Wallpaper.
flashback: it's a box!
Since then, aside from the addition of a person and some shuffling of layout, we really hadn’t done much with the place. We theorized about covering the Hideous Wallpaper with a curtain, we pondered couches, we debated the merits of having lots of floor space versus having things to sit on and store things in. However, well over a month after deciding something needed to be done, we still hadn’t actually bought anything.
One night, coming home from downtown and planning to eat a rather nice supper on the bed again, I snapped, and we ducked into an E-mart, to emerge fifteen minutes later, richer one table.
nice table! shame about the wallpaper, though.
It’s a low, Asian-style table, with nice folding legs that snap into place. It’s bigger than our little tiny Western table, and we have pleasant grey floor cushions to sit on. Won’t the floor be cold to sit on? you may be asking. No, it won’t be, because our apartment is heated by a gently warmed floor. WIN. We celebrated with a fabulous dinner.
mmmmm.
We still had a seating problem, though. The floor is only so comfortable, after all, and the bed didn’t work particularly well as a couch. I found a solution from, of all places, Ikea.
introducing: Solsta.
Anyone who has listened to my Ikea rants before knows that I would happily furnish a whole house in Ikea. I like the lines, I like the versatility, I like the lack of big brown flowers. Unfortunately, I keep living in the only places on earth without convenient access to Ikea. Korea doesn’t have any, not even in Seoul, but they do have a few weird little online import stores that can arrange Ikea for you if you are willing to jump through some hoops. I went through the appropriately named Weagookin Mall.
Ah ha! I said, upon seeing the Solsta couch. It’s a dark grey like the leafy things in the Hideous Wallpaper. Perhaps I will make peace with the wallpaper through the acquisition of this nice couch. The shipping is even free inside Korea! And they take Paypal!
It ended up being more of an odyssey than I expected, as their site is a little buggy and we had a lengthy email exchange before we could get Paypal going, but once it was ordered, it took just two days to show up at our door.
There was another hitch when it arrived yesterday.
waaaait a sec. wasn't it grey in the catalogue?
It is not grey. It is, however, a perfectly acceptable slate blue. It even looks pretty okay with the Hideous Wallpaper, which I think we can all agree takes some doing. It’s a loveseat, rather than a full size couch, which is perfect for our smallish concrete box, and it folds out into a bed, in case we have visitors. I have hopes.
So, slowly, we are converting our concrete box into a comfortable living space. I have some modest plans for plants and a bookshelf. The next thing, though, is pretty obvious:
we really, really need to get bedding that doesn’t look like a nursery, garden or otherwise.
November 11th is a special day in South Korea – most of all in elementary schools, I think. No, it’s not Remembrance day or Veteran’s Day; it’s a day when you are supposed to give cookie sticks, dipped in chocolate, to your friends and loved ones. In Korea, they’re called Pepero, though anyone who has had Japanese Pocky will find them hauntingly familiar.
Why November 11th? The date, 11/11, looks like chopsticks, which led to the idea of giving chopstick-shaped treats. There’s a traditional food called garaeddeok that is supposedly some kind of alternate to Pepero, but this correspondant saw nothing but Pepero.
It’s a lot of like Valentine’s Day in an elementary school. Students come to school with a paper shopping bag full of Pepero and give them to their friends and teachers. Native speakers tend to be favourites, so we get more Pepero than some teachers. Every time I set foot outside the office, a boy would run over and shove a box in my hand, or a little girl would creep over and shyly give me an individually wrapped big pepero.
my Pepero stash, minus the two green boxes I already ate
There is a dark side to this holiday, of course. Just like on Valentine’s Day, there’s always the unpopular kids who gets no Pepero and bursts into tears. This year, the entire sixth grade got in trouble because a few sixth grade kids bullied some fifth graders into handing over their Pepero. And, of course, school lunch went largely uneaten and the kids zoomed around with bellies full of chocolate.
I think, for me, the best part of Pepero Day was the day after Pepero Day, when a little girl in one of my fifth grade classes gave me some hand-dipped Pepero she had made for me. I didn’t have her class on Pepero Day, so she brought them the next day, with a little note for me:
"hi~ teacher! (today is Pepero Day)! today is !! This is for you! By~ by~! 5-1 Eun Seul"
Most EPIK teachers I’ve talked to seem to dislike the CD curriculum, ranging from “man, it’s weird” to “I prefer to plan all my own lessons rather than subject my students to that stuff”. My coteachers seem to like it for the most part – it is reasonably well structured – and occasionally the kids really like the videos. For example, this is from grade 3, chapter 6 (almost the end of their first year of lessons), “How Many Cows”:
Grade 3-4 and 5-6 have different recurring characters. The girl who takes a banana to the face is Lisa, for example. This makes it pretty easy to ask all kinds of questions – “Who is she? What did Lisa say? What did Lisa do?”. There are more chant and song activities that develop the little story and get students to practice key phrases.
The kids love it when the characters get hit with bananas and go “oooooh!” when the bear is BIG at them. I have a sneaking suspicion that native speakers who end up with grade four and three use the textbook way more, and, when in their cups at EPIK talent shows, seem pretty enthusiastic about singing these little ditties. With actions.
There are some problems, though. As you go up in grade levels, as least as far as I’ve seen, the well-made cartoons are replaced with live action clips, featuring a truly bizarre cast of bad actors who are usually dubbed by worse voice actors. Nami’s mom and dad are possibly the worst of the bunch:
And Nami has clearly inherited the “terribly dubbed” genes from both sides. That’s her little brother, Namsu, they are stealing from. What makes it even worse is that they aren’t dubbing her because Nami’s Voice speaks English as a first language – her accent is really weird.
Joon is played by a child that they paint with freckles and stick improbable glasses on, then poorly dubbed on top of it. Also, why is this set in a boy’s locker room? Why can’t they use shoes? Or mittens? Remember, this is supposed to be educating fifth grade students.
What prompted the clip show today, though, was the trippy roleplays we end up with. The textbook, with the purest of intentions, tries to use vignettes from classic stories to have children use target vocabulary. This almost never works well, either as language practice or staying the spirit of the original story. I can’t find their reworking of Tom Sawyer’s infamous fence-painting escapade, but it doesn’t make sense at all. The students were so bored with it that I wrote a completely different script after the first time we used it.
What I do have, though, is the grade four roleplay for this chapter: “Is this your cap?” They are supposed to be practicing “Is this yours? No it isn’t/Yes it is” and variations. The myth is about a forest spirit helping a boy find a ball that has fallen in a lake.
If you want to see more, you can see most of Grade 3 here, and Grade 4, along with lots of grade six snippets, here.
Honourable mentions from me, because I like them and they get stuck in my head:
I’m not trained to be a teacher. Actually, my degree is a very nice one, a joint Honours in Anthropology and Classics; it’s pretty useful in this job, with all that cultural understanding and linguistics theory, though the archaeology bit tends to go to waste. The point of the native speaker program is supposed to be supplementing existing teachers with our native speaking abilities and wacky cultural quirks, not lesson planning, grading, and maintain classroom discipline. Unfortunately, a lot of existing teachers are pretty happy to hand off English to the English speaker, regardless of the intent of the program, and so we often end up with a fair bit of planning and discipline on our hands.
I’m luckier than many native speakers; my main school has English subject teachers for me to work with. This has a couple advantages; instead of trying to work with twelve different homeroom teachers, I only have to work with two subject teachers, one for each grade. We have pretty good working relationships at this point, which means I can rely on them to prepare activities and they can rely on me to deliver them. At my little school, I work with three coteachers, who each teach English to two classes; it’s less ideal, especially because we only deliver each lesson once and have no opportunities to experiment or work out a rhythm. Still, Suhyeon and Jiyun work hard and we get along well. The other one, well. I’m working on it, starting with speaking loudly and clearly.
I do end up with a fair bit of influence over lessons, in the end; even with preplanned lessons, things need adjusting or, sometimes, replacement on the fly. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, but your mileage may vary; I’m teaching ESL in elementary schools, with coteachers who are generally willing to support me in the classroom.
- You can only teach so much in one lesson. Educational goals in the textbook tend to be 6 – 10 words or simple phrases per lesson, and depending on the subject matter, that can be a lot. On the other hand, you are in luck, because your kids have so much vocabulary drilled in their heads to draw upon. They know colours, and numbers, and food, and last week’s lesson (hopefully) – pull it in and make them use it, instead of trying to cram too many unfamiliar words into them at once and making them hit a wall of frustration.
- Have a routine. It gets everyone in the same headspace. I used to do it when studying Latin – paint my nails, make a cup of tea, gather my books around, and then seriously hit them for two hours. In the classroom, I ask them the day, the weather, and how they are today. If we had a useful lesson recently, I’ll use that too – like this week’s grade five lesson, “what did you do yesterday?”.
- Get them to experiment by making them want to communicate. They know that when I ask them how they are, they can answer “Fine” or “So-so” – but if they want to take the floor to explain to me, in broken English, that they are TERRIBLE because their FRIEND [dramatic courtroom drama pointing at another student] STOLE their PENCIL – well, they can go right ahead, and I’ll listen. It’s not always useful, but the vocabulary that pops out sometimes is amazing, and if the other students are interested, they jump in and try to translate too. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it makes them actually access all that English they cram into their heads, and to me that’s way more valuable than listen-and-repeat exercises.
- If they are yelling in English, you are succeeding. A lot of our games are based around getting students to repeat question and answer pairs, but if you don’t make sure every kid knows them cold and then stay on top of them for the activity, they’ll play the game and have a ball without actually speaking English at all. On the other hand, if you drill the phrases into them and write them on the board, then give the kids permission to make an ungodly amount of noise as long as it’s English, you can generally get them shouting key phrases at each other in no time – and reading them off the board, too. Being too scared to be audible in English is the enemy.
- People like control. Kids, being small people, like it too – possibly even more than the regular size, because they have so little of it in their lives. If you let them dictate instructions to you, they will be thrilled, and start yelling whatever English they have in order to do it. For example, one fifth grade activity about the rooms in a house called for each group to draw a perfect house and then explain it to the class – which worked great, but took far too long for our 40 minute class. Instead, I changed it to one big house, drawn on the board, for the whole class – by me. They told me what they wanted, I drew it – no exceptions – as long as it was in English. A pizza robot in the kitchen? Done. Ten dogs in the bathroom? Well, you get one dog with x10 next to it, which went over well. A zoo in the living room? Sure, it’s an elephant watching TV. I am a terrible artist, but they were quite pleased. And yelling in English.
- Small children learn like eager little sponges. My first grade class needs about twice the work that a sixth grade class needs, because they suck up vocabulary and then it’s boring and they want something new. I don’t want to undermine the curriculum they start in grade three, so I’m mostly sticking with vocabulary, but they’re also sucking up prepositions and directions, because the textbook is so immersion-focused I don’t think they are ever really introduced to “up”, “on”, or “left” except in context. They might as well learn it now so all those key phrases later are easier to understand.
That’s it for now, but I’m sure I’ll have more rookie wisdom to come.
As any blogger knows, the longer you go without writing, the harder it is to start again – there’s a feeling of having to catch up on absolutely everything that’s gone on. I’m going to forgo that for the most part and just sort of pick up where I left off.
It’s been frustrating, working out ways to fit in at this new job. While I’ve been here for two full months, I’ve really only been at each school for half that time, and I only see most students once a week. I’m not trained as a teacher, and while I’ve always known more about the workings of an elementary school than most people do (Hi Mom!), there are a lot of things I don’t know, and a lot of things that are Korea-specific – especially in the way hierarchy works.
I’ve been silent on the principle that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you probably shouldn’t say anything at all, and while there have been lots of nice things that have happened, the past month has been full of surprises that leave me angry or frustrated or, most often, scrambling for solutions way after work hours.
One thing about working in Korea is that you, as Waygook Native Speaker Extraordinaire, will always be the last one to know what’s going on. This is not worrying when it’s things like the school menu or classes being cancelled (unexpected “take a rest” time tend to salve most wounds). I thought, after my work experiences, that this wouldn’t bother me too much; many teachers who complain about work conditions here seem to complain about things that would happen in any full time, responsible job. In point of fact, yes, it is extremely annoying to be out of the loop to this extent. For me, the worst is having no time for damage control.
Example A:
I may have mentioned that I was asked to participate in a coteaching demonstration class with a third grade teacher I’ve never taught with before. I had lots of prior warning, and even practiced with the class in question twice. Demonstration classes take place during inspection day, when the entire school board mills around evaluating the cleanliness of bathrooms, the decor of classrooms, and the quality of student poetry displayed on the walls (I wish I were exaggerating), and it’s an extremely high-pressure event, especially for younger teachers, who can be expected to be torn apart during evaluation.
The problem was that I was supposed to be at my other school that day, and that school didn’t appreciate me missing time there, so the plan was that I would bus over to the demonstration school halfway through the day. As the day drew closer, I kept pointing out to the teachers involved that I had no idea when during the day the class was, and could they please tell me so I could be there on time. I got absolutely nothing back until the day before the demo class, when I flipped out and called every teacher I had a phone number for, looking for information. That evening, someone called me to tell me I wasn’t needed at the class after all.
Example B:
I’ve been trying to schedule meetings with Mira, my wonderful parent class coteacher, so that we can straighten out our lesson plans before each class. In theory, I can only really manage this on Wednesday afternoons, as I’m at my little school on Monday and Tuesday and the parent class is immediately after lunch on Thursday; Mira isn’t a teacher at the school, so we can’t just meet casually. Two weeks ago, I scheduled a meeting right after lunch and Mira agreed to come in. That morning, I was told that we had a staff volleyball game in the afternoon at a different school; I insisted on having the meeting, so a teacher stayed behind to bring me along when we finished up.
The following week, trying to avoid the same problem, I emailed my coteacher on Sunday night asking if anything was going on Wednesday afternoon. Tuesday evening, he finally called me to let me know that the entire staff would be leaving right after lunch to go to a mountain to view the autumn leaves, and also he wouldn’t be in all week, so I wasn’t teaching sixth grade at all, and therefore he had called Mira to reschedule my meeting to happen during one of my sixth grade periods.
This would have been very helpful, except that he didn’t tell me or Mira that they had accelerated the class schedule for the day to have no breaks, so instead of having a full period to discuss lesson plans, we had more like twenty minutes. Also, the trip to the mountains ended up including dinner. A story for another time, I think.
Example C:
Last Monday, the coteacher with whom I was having so many problems before came to me in the morning and said, “You will teach the teacher training class Monday and Tuesday afternoons, starting today.” And smiled.
I pointed out to her that she had effectively cancelled the teacher training courses in early October, and that I didn’t have time to plan two lessons per week, especially with four hours notice. She blinked at me and said yes. I told her, bluntly, that I couldn’t teach without having time to prepare. She looked confused, but eventually we agreed that I would start teaching on Tuesday.
I was angry. She has been making me pretty upset on a weekly basis, and I was already feeling the crunch for planning time just with Mira and the parent class; two more classes wasn’t going to happen without a lot of stress on my part. Worse, on Monday I had two hours of “planning time” in “my office” (the library) that were already made practically useless by the violin and flute lessons that go on around me (try planning lessons with ten beginner violin students learning to tune in the room). Those two hours of teacher class were literally the last hours I had left at that school for planning.
So the next morning I confronted her and pointed all the problems out. She looked confused. I told her there was no way I was teaching two classes. That seemed to get through, and we negotiated down to Mondays only. A small victory.
The happy ending, though, came later that day, when I asked Jiyun if there were anywhere I could work to escape the violins. She wasn’t sure, and asked the head teacher… who gave her the same blinking, confused, blank smile routine I’d been getting. Jiyun still looked confused when she walked away, and I asked what was wrong. “Oh,” she said, “She’s very difficult to talk to. Her hearing is bad, but she pretends that she understands rather than ask anyone to repeat themselves. It’s a problem.”
It’s nice to know it’s not just me.
I’m writing this instead of the rant that was threatening to bubble over all morning. I had a rough morning.
Something that’s been floated recently in the Gwangju EPIK Facebook group is the idea of evaluating our coteachers. Basically, we are evaluated by our coteachers as our contracts wind up, and they decide whether to recommend that we be asked to sign a new contract; however, we have no opportunity to give feedback to our coteachers.
In theory, everyone should welcome the opportunity to get some feedback on their teaching and their ability to co-teach (not the same thing by a long shot). I have one coteacher, for example, that would benefit greatly from someone telling him that he shouldn’t worry so much about befriending the students as much as he should worry about maintaining some kind of order in the class. I do wonder, though, if we are the ones to do it.
We (as in, the average EPIK teacher) aren’t trained as teachers, or in co-teaching, or in English grammar. We’re here to speak English as it is generally spoken, where we come from. Our coteachers are frequently older than us, and they have more experience and training than we will probably ever have. No one likes being told what they’re doing wrong by someone who is unqualified. Also, age and seniority are a big deal in the workplace (and not, as some teachers suppose, only in Korea) and being told what you’re doing wrong by a junior stings, even on matters where the junior is more qualified – in our cases, pronounciation or natural phrasing.
It’s hard to see how a “feedback” session could work without doing more damage than good. A coteacher who has been under the blissful misunderstanding that their native speaker is happy with the way they conduct classes would be mortified if an Office of Education feedback document landed on their desk, outlining all kinds of problems they didn’t know about. A one on one approach, while not embarassing your coteacher in front of their bosses, could seriously damage your working relationship if you aren’t careful.
What seems to be called for here is someone to make sure that we have the ability to talk to our coteachers about issues without compromising ourselves. And that, unfortunately, is something we should be able to do without the Office of Education getting involved, but we don’t want to. I’m definitely guilty of this – I am having some significant communication problems with an older coteacher that are leaving me confused and frustrated on a weekly basis (this morning being an example), and as nice as it would be to complain loudly at a feedback form or a third party and make someone else find a solution, things are just never going to get much better without sitting down and addressing these things with my coteacher, one on one, in a calm way.
Which isn’t easy. We have a lot of reasons to bite our tongues, not least because of the language barrier. Making a problem clear without being uncomfortable blunt is difficult even in English, and with a language barrier, it can be prohibitive. The coteacher I’m putting off talking to, for example, has such poor English that we have had serious miscommunications because she confuses “last” and “next” and tenses in general. Poor English comes across as rude, or accusatory, when it may not be intended as such. I do have to try, though, for the sake of getting along for the next year.
I recognize that there are problems that a quiet chat aren’t going to help, and for that we have our handlers, and Mark and the rest of the Office of Ed staff. They’re here for when problems persist, or when something happens that is severe enough to require a third party. For run of the mill issues, though, I question whether involving paperwork and bureaucracy will improve matters more than just talking about our problems as they come up.
Filed under: teachering
I’ve been pretty busy this week.
I’ve added a few more classes to my plate, which is probably the biggest thing. On Tuesdays and Thursday, I’m taking Korean classes (kindly provided gratis by the Office of Education – thanks guys) at the university that is about an hour’s commute (subway and taxi) away from my home, so I have time after work to get home, change, grab a quick bite to eat and then dash out again for my two hour class. I get home at about 10, which is a bit long.
I’ve also started the teacher class at my rural school, which is only half an hour. I’m a little confused as to what they want me to do; if you come to Korea, expect to hear “teach whatever you want” an awful lot. I’m sure they don’t know what they want to learn, but it would be nice to know what they’ve already learned, as most of them took a great deal of English in school at some point. In any case they may be postponing it until November now, which is really fine with me, as Tuesdays I teach six classes anyway.
And today, I started my first class for parents at my big school. It’s scheduled for two hours every Thursday, and I’m actually getting paid for it. Even better, I have a co-teacher for it, who is sweet and helpful and speaks good English. She picked a good textbook, and is very impressed with my mad Powerpoint skillz.
The problem, I guess, is that I teach four classes in the morning, and have barely half an hour after those classes to eat lunch and pull myself together for a two hour class. It’s a small class – seven parents signed up, and five actually came – and they are mostly pretty shy, so it’s a little awkward, but Mira and I soldiered on through and it went alright for the most part. I expect that we will get more comfortable as time goes by, with each other and with our students.
Another problem is that I’m sick. No, not with swine flu. It’s just a crappy head cold, but my throat is pretty scratched up and after yelling along with kids all morning (I can’t even help it, I’m too used to shouting along with chants to keep them going) it’s pretty painful to talk, let alone lead another class, let alone one that involves singing ABBA as a teaching aid.
Also, one of my students had a great deal of trouble concentrating on the lesson, as she brought her teething (adorable) toddler with her to class. Now, I’m not going to tell her she has to get a babysitter – I have a feeling she would just stop coming altogether – but she’s trying unsuccessfully to wean her, and the toddler kept bursting into tears throughout class. Eventually her mom gave in and breastfed her for the second half of class, on and off, which pretty much put an end to her participating in the class at all. Luckily my other students, all being mothers themselves, are pretty good at dealing with toddler disruptions.
And, tonight, more commuting to Korean class! I just hope I’m not expected to talk too much. Or sing Dancing Queen, because I got my fill of that this afternoon.
