2005-09-04 - First week of teaching:

So my first week of teaching went pretty well! They set it up so that you are based out of one school, but visit other schools once a week. I am at my base school two days a week, and i visit three other schools as well, once a week each. The county I am working is large and fairly spread-out, so schools tend to be small, and they are all competing for a native English speaker. The government has a plan to get a native speaker in every school within the next few years, but in the meantime, the ones who are here are working many schools at once.

Luckily, it works out that I teach three classes a day, at 45 minutes each, because each school I am signed on to has only one class per grade. So I have a lot of office hours to do lesson planning and so on. Also, I get Tuesday afternoons off, which is pretty sweet.

I have seen 2 of my schools so far, including my base school. Next week I visit the other two. The classes tend to have a wide range of levels, but the teachers mix up the groups so that higher level students can work with lower level students. My base school is fantastic, and the students are dilligent and willing to learn, even though their level is somewhat low. The second school I saw has grades 7 and 8 at really low levels, and so the classes are disruptive, so I think I will have a challenge to get them to pay attention and be interested every week. Fortunately, the grade 9 class makes up for it: their level is quite good, and there are a few students who are quite proficient, including one student who is extremely fluent, and I can have conversations with her. Her grammar and pronunciation is perfect!

I'm nervous about meeting the other two schools next week, but I have bought some good ESL books I got at this excellent bookstore, and hopefully I will get a lot of ideas. Plus I do have a grammar textbook from when I did my grammar unit for TESL certification, so that will help also: the biggest problem is grammar, really. The Korean language has no articles, no male and female distinction (her book and his car have the same word for he/she) and there are no verb tenses, either. So it is a challenge for them to be faced with a language that has various tenses and articles.

But, Korean is by no means a simple language: it has about 42 characters in its alphabet, and a slew of rules of its own... overall it is ranked the 3rd hardest language to learn, with Chinese coming in first, and Japanese second. I am trying my hardest to learn it, though: the Korean students find it very funny when I speak in Korean, because my accent is of course, awful. But they understand what I mean: hopefully that will get the point accross that the accent doesn't matter so much, as long as your ideas are clear. I try to make the point that it is OK for students to have an accent. It takes the pressure off of them speaking in class, and they subconcously pick up on language nuances so that their pronunciation gets better without them being hung-up on it. At least that is what I gather from speaking with other teachers I have met.

Overall I am having a good time here, and I know that I will probably have days where I wonder what the hell I am doing here, as most people feel that way at some point. And I know of the stages of culture shock and living in a new country, so I am prepared for what to expect, and by no means am I giving up on myself here. Luckily I am a pretty ballsy and headstrong person, who likes to see things through to the end, no matter what, so I do not plan on leaving any loose ends here, regardless of what happens. Yay!