Snow White

August 31, 2010


Yesterday I was able to meet some of my students…and I definitely mean SOME. There’s no way I can remember all of my students. Back home there might be like 3 third grade classes in the entire school. Yeah, well here there are 10 third grade classes and 12 fourth grade classes. Each class has about 30 students so if you do the math… that’s like 300 third graders and 360 fourth graders. I see about 700 students a WEEK! Goodness gracious. Mondays and Tuesdays I see 4 third grade classes and one fourth grade class. Right now the classes start a little earlier because it’s just too hot to teach any later in the day so I finish teaching classes about 12:30pm and have lunch with the other English teachers. Wednesdays I see two third grade classes and 2 fourth grade classes. Thursdays and Fridays I will teach 4 fourth grade classes each day.
Last night the principle of our school had a welcoming dinner for all of the new incoming teachers (including Michael and I) and most of the teachers showed up at this Japanese restaurant. Literally there was at least 60 of us there. When you walked into the restaurant (had to take off our shoes and sit on the floor) there was food galore! I mean I couldn’t eat most of it because it was raw fish everywhere…like really raw…and not in a sushi roll. But there were some dishes like cooked fish, soup, bi bim bop and so forth that I could eat and it was very delicious. We talked with some of the other English teachers for a bit and then on of the Physical Ed teachers sat next to me and Michael to talk for a while. He wanted to meet us and ask how old we were. He was 25 years old but when I first saw him I thought he was 21. He was very nice but me and Michael can’t remember what his name is! It is extremely difficult to remember the Korean names…I’ll need to work on that ASAP. He asked if we drink (alcoholic beverages), we both nodded and he suggested that we go out for dinner and drinks sometime soon. I can’t wait to start hanging out with my teachers outside of work!

I was super excited today because I was able to actually co-teach with one of my teachers today. Un Hyun is the third grade English teacher so I stuck with her all day. Typically I would teach with the fourth grade English teacher in the last period but 12 classes is too many for one teacher so the third grade English teacher (Un Hyun) teaches 2 fourth grade classes. I hope that makes sense. Anyway, today I taught the students how to write the letters “Aa, Bb, Cc” and then we did a role play. The textbooks are specifically designed to incorporate listening, speaking, writing, singing, and role-play into the lessons in order for the students to get as much exposure to the language as possible within 40 minutes. Un Hyun and I went back and forth teaching specific portions of the lesson. I was very surprised with eagerness of the students. You can tell that they want to learn English and they were very willing to guess the answers even if they were not entirely correct. The role-play did not go as well as intended with the 3rd grade because they did not really understand the instructions even when explained in Korean (the English classes are taught in both English and Korean; sometimes the teacher will ask what a certain English phrase means in Korean, etc.). Un Hyun and I decided that maybe the role-play could just be between me and the class as a whole. That worked much better in the later classes.

I was so excited with my last class of the day. It was a fourth grade class so they understood a little more vocabulary than the other classes because the others were third grade. The lesson went very smoothly; the Korean-English teacher and I worked very well with the tag-teaming and then the last portion of the lesson was role-play. They had to listen and watch a short animated video about snow white and the witch. Before the video I asked them if they could tell me who the princess was and who the old woman was. They answered “princess” and “witch.” They watched and listened to the clip and I asked them questions about what they heard. They recited many of the lines that were said and I asked them other questions for comprehension purposes. They were all right! After watching the video several more times and reciting the lines, my co-teacher and I split them into groups of four students and had them act out what they saw. After some practice, we asked for volunteers to perform in front of class. It was awesome! They did so well! I was so happy! I wish you could’ve seen it! They had some troubles with memorizing the lines (but it was kind of a long skit…I wouldn’t of been able to remember it all!). Overall, a very successful day!