Day 4 of living in Korea: more thoughts and impressions about school

One thing that has really driven me nuts the last three days is some of my co-teachers. They'll arrive either right on time or several minutes late! For each and every class that I see this week, it's the first time I'm ever seeing them. So I'm understandably having a hard time getting the kids under control until the teacher chooses to walk into the room. And sometimes after they walk in depending on the teacher. So today, with my last class of the day, I was finally able to take the bull by the horns! HA! I walked around, got them to sit down, and shut the doors, all before the co-teacher arrived (5 minutes late). I guess I can understand why they don't feel the need to arrive on time-technically they're not really supposed to be doing anything for my class-but it's still really frustrating and disrespectful.

The good news is I seem to have been hitting my stride in class. I did finish early in my 3rd grade class today, which sucked, but everything else has gone swimmingly. My parents' class was interesting. The first five minutes was me sitting in there by myself. Finally one parent showed up: Mrs. Geum, which I learned is Korean for "gold." We talked for a little bit-she's a 44 year old mother of 3 who is married to an Korean English teacher. Very nice lady. Mrs. Lee showed up a few minutes later. She's a 39 year old mother of two who is a housewife. They were both very pleasant ladies that I enjoyed talking to. They told me that they didn't think one hour a week was enough and tried to get me to commit to more...thankfully I asked my main co-teacher about it and she said there was no way, since that would put me over my required hours.

At the beginning of every class, the president of the class stands up and says, "Attention! Bow to teacher." Then everybody bows and says "Good morning" or "good afternoon." How awesome is that?

We've been studying two things in each grade this week. 2nd grade (7th grade) has been studying "I'm so sorry" and descriptions of people. For "I'm so sorry," I made a worksheet that has reasons to apologize and apologies on there that they have to match up. For example: "You dropped my plate." goes with "I'm so sorry. It slipped out of my hands." At the end of the class, we've been playing a memory game where they have to try and match these up in pairs. Some of the combinations have been hilarious! "You broke my window." "I'm so sorry. I was hungry." "You drank all of my water." "I'm so sorry. I threw the baseball too hard." are some of the examples of the mismatches. The nice thing about their English level (especially the advanced classes) is that they can giggle along with me at the mismatches. They also learned a few new words: pothole and suspenders. So that's been fun :-)

The 3rd grade (8th grade) is studying men's and women's roles in the English language and agree/don't agree. At first I was a little offended by it, but I don't think it was intended to stereotype. We talk about whether or not they've seen a female fire fighter before, or police office, or boxer, etc. I ask them to come up with some other jobs that you don't always see women doing. My favorite one so far? Father. Yup, one of my 3rd grade boys threw that out there today. This is why I love teaching middle school. Don't get me wrong, it's had its rough moments too. But moments like that, where I can laugh with them, make it worth it.

Another thing that gets them riled up is agree/don't agree. We start off simple: I think fire fighting is mostly a man's job. A few agree, most disagree. We go through men are stronger than women and men are smarter than women. Then, we get to the fun one. In Korea, all men are required to go into the military for two years after high school. So I ask the class if they think women should go into the military. Every single boy raises his hand and yells in agreement! And then every single girl meekly raises her hand in disagreement! Not surprising, just fun to watch.

So far, my favorite classroom technology is the automatic water-based chalkboard eraser. It's positioned at either end of the chalkboard, and when you hit the button, it goes all the way across the chalkboard and wipes the board completely clean. Fantastic!