"Teaching"

In case anyone forgot "to teach" means to impart knowledge or skill; give instruction. Being in Korea I think I often forget what it means to teach. Yes, I am theoretically an English teacher and I spend a sizable chunk of my work week "teaching", but I often wonder if what I do is actually teaching. First let me break down what a typical (although there isn't really such thing as a typical week here since my schedule seems to change without notice every two seconds) week entails. 


Monday: Work from 8:40-4:40. Co-teach four classes of 6th grade in the morning (all the same lesson).


Tuesday: Co-teach four classes of 6th grade in the morning (same lesson as Monday). Teach one after school class of 1st and 2nd graders with minimal English knowledge. 


Wednesday: Co-teach two classes of 6th grade (SAME lesson as Monday and Tuesday--this is where I contemplate suicide), and two of 5th grade (this is where we start to question the word "teach). Teach teachers' English (well the two teachers who show up) for approximately two hours (although this has changed every week so far). 


Thursday: Co-teach three (but sometimes four or five, the schedule seems to change every single week) classes of 5th grade (same lesson as Wednesday). Teach after school 1st and 2nd grade. 


Friday: Co-teach four (sometimes more sometimes less) classes of 5th grade (SAME lesson as Wednesday and Thursday--again contemplate suicide). In Konglish: pinishee (finished!). Bring on the weekend!


Now let me do a little math for you:


-There are approximately 30 students in each of my regular 5th and 6th grade classes.
30x10 classes= 300 individual 6th graders
30x9 classes= 270 individual 5th graders
20 1st and 2nd graders. 
Total students= approx 600 individual students!!


-I teach the same lesson every week to my 5th and 6th graders
1x 10 classes= 10 times of pure torture (besides the first and second lessons where it's semi fun to see students reactions)
1x9 classes= 9 times of pure torture (and there is virtually no enjoyment when it comes to 5th grade)
2x 2 classes= 2 times of fun with adorable Korean children who I can do whatever I want with


Conclusion: My job can be pretty boring. There is no possible way to get to know my students because I see so many of them. 5th and 6th graders study English three times per week, they see me one time per week. Am I helping them much? Probably not. 


So this all sounds a bit negative. It's not all bad, really. There are a lot of things I enjoy about teaching but the problem is what I do 80% of the time is not what I would call teaching. In a perfect world where the contract that I signed and what I learned at orientation is followed, my lessons would go something like this: My co-teachers and I would share equally the teaching and lesson planning load. My job is to be a pronunciation guide for the students and something of a novelty since I am from a different country and look different from every other person in my school. My co-teacher is supposed to be the disciplinarian, the one who teaches grammar concepts (because las a native speaker you really don't know grammar all that well), and a translator when I explain something in English. In my 6th grade classes my co-teacher and I achieve these goals relatively well. It doesn't mean that I'm still not bored out of my mind by class number ten of teaching the same lesson but I think we both still manage to have some fun in the midst of the monotony and I think most of the students enjoy themselves and don't leave the classroom hating English. 

This is about the enthusiasm most of my 5th graders
have for English after I'm finished with them. 

5th grade on the other hand is a different story. When teaching in Korea, you never quite know what you're going to get when it comes to co-teachers, schools, apartments, and location. I was lucky in my location, my apartment, and my main 6th grade co-teacher but of course there are things I would love to change. I am at least outwardly a patient and positive person, but "teaching" 5th grade tries even my outward patience. What are my primary duties? "Teaching" spelling (in quotations because I am NOT qualified to teach spelling therefore I don't think I'm actually imparting any knowledge to my students since I didn't have any spelling knowledge to begin with), playing games that bore me out of my mind (and I think bore my students as well), and assigning endless homework assignments that amount to essentially handwriting practice for the students. Some of the 5th graders are little devils (they know more English profanity than other vocabulary combined) yet there is little discipline in the classroom. I am the last thing from an expert teacher, but I have discovered that part of effective teaching is good classroom management and being aware of what is going on in all corners of the classroom. When a student is crying, likely because of another devil student aggravating her, in my mind something should be done.  


But this is not the place for me to rant on my teaching woes. In my little dream world I am a good teacher that my students will remember for a long time, and I am actually helping my students learn some English while enjoying the learning process. This can be a difficult to impossible task in Korea. Because of private English academies that middle to upper class families send their children to, the English abilities of students in my classes can vary from kids who could carry on a pretty good conversation with me, to kids who can't read English. Managing this huge discrepancy in levels, while trying to make the required textbook material interesting and fun is only possible with a co-teacher who can effectively manage the classroom, has a fun personality and perhaps remembers what it was like to be a student. I've accepted the fact that this goal will never be accomplished with 5th grade, instead my new more achievable goals are to amuse at least one or two students in class by my ridiculous behavior (also serves the purpose of keeping me amused), and have fun with and teach (the full definition of the word) my 1st and 2nd graders. 


While I may not always give instruction or impart knowledge, I can brag that I have a job where I get paid to be overly dramatic, sing, dance, sometimes shout, play, and draw. And at least I haven't quite stooped to the level of an English robot (but perhaps pretty close at times). Soon robots will replace Native Teachers in Korea so until that day I continue trying to amuse my students with my clown-like antics. See video below.   

  

Breaking things down

I'm really good and breaking things into small manageable segments. Perhaps it's my love of math, my excruciatingly boring summer internship four years ago that forced me to break my  eight hour day into slightly more manageable fifteen minute segments, or my OCD running habits. Whatever it is, I have now broken down my remaining months in Korea. Less than two weeks until my next day off. Two short weeks, then three weeks until July. Then two weeks of classes until summer vacation. Then two weeks until Philippines and Bali, then two weeks and bye bye Korea! Craaazy when I break things down into two to three week segments! I am now experiencing a mixture of excitement and sadness about finishing this segment of life.

Living in Korea and perhaps living abroad in general is like a long roller coaster ride. The beginning is filled with lots of quick ups and downs that are super exciting! There are so many new tastes, customs, sights, and people to meet. Then comes the biggest hill in the roller coaster ride. Slowly, slowly you start chugging up the hill and all the things that were once new and exciting have now become boring and obnoxious. Would you stop spitting in public already? I really don't feel like stepping in your phlegm and hearing you hack a loogie every five minutes. But then you reach the top of the hill and you can see the end of the ride. It's all downhill in one dizzying, exhilarating blur. That's where I'm at. I'm trying to frantically take everything in, try everything I haven't tried yet, see as many places as I can, and continue to cultivate the amazing friendships I've made while still seeking to make new random connections and friends, but all this is going by at a frantic high speed (but I seem to always attack life full steam ahead anyway).

My last few weeks have been filled with probably my favorite aspect of traveling and living in new places: meeting people. These past three weeks have allowed me to expand my random connections. Meeting the son of the owner of the number one tortilla company in Korea (as if there's many more than one tortilla company in Korea)? Check. Free tortillas? Working on it. A week ago a friend and I headed south to Gyeongju to run a half marathon and enjoy cherry blossoms. Being the cheapos and curious folks that we are, we once again couchsurfed. A nice Korean professor who was gone for the weekend gave the key to his apartment to two of his students. We stayed in his apartment for two days and were showed around by his friendly and comical students. I don't think I've laughed so much in a long time (which is saying something considering I probably laugh around 50% of the day). One of the students has never had a "foreign friend" before so he was so thrilled to meet my friend and I that he even signed up for facebook to keep in touch with us. Our conversation with these two quirky gents drifted between broken English, and something resembling charades. It still amazes me how relatively easily human beings can understand each other in spite of language differences. I look forward to more adventures with these new friends!

Besides meeting new people I am excited for four more months with my incredible group of friends here, enjoying runs on the color infused streets of Incheon for the next couple weeks as the spring flowers peek out from the metal jungle and human storage units, cramming my brain with as much Korean as I can before I leave and likely forget everything I've learned, and stuffing myself with the deliciousness that is Korean food before it's taken away from me. With all these exciting things to look forward to and the absolutely perfect weather that has finally graced Incheon, I was actually half tempted to stay another year the other day. If I ignore the little part of my life that is "teaching" (if you can actually call what I do teaching) Korean devil children, my life here isn't so bad. Part of me craves being able to stay in the same place for just one more year instead of continuing my life habit of packing and unpacking, saying goodbye and saying hello. But my perpetual antsiness and realization that "teaching" English to Korean children is most certainly NOT my life calling prevents me from sticking around. Instead, in true Rachel fashion I'm on an application rampage. Stability aside in just over four months kimchi will be sadly lacking from my diet and I won't be bowing to every person I meet. Having a home would be nice, but hopping to another new and exciting place would be even nicer.

P.S. I received a wonderful but also heartbreaking compliment from my 5th grade co-teacher the other day. "You are a really good teacher. I really hope you stay in Korea."
My response: "Uhhhh... thank you! I guess I have a lot of thinking to do and decisions to make."

Winter English Camp: Around the World in 10 days

After spending the past four years of my life in college busy taking too many credits a semester, completing seemingly endless engineering assignments, being involved in too many student organizations, running competitively for three years, and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, living and teaching English in Korea is often WAY too easy and mindless for me. So often my main job is to just to drill correct pronunciation into my students by making them repeat useless sentences after me. This task I could do in my sleep. Needless to say I was thrilled about winter English camps! I had free reign to choose the theme, plan lessons, and I had the challenge of having no co-teacher to translate for me. Naturally, my theme was "Around the World". American and Korean students have an alarming lack of knowledge about the world outside the borders of their own countries, so my goal was to give them a small taste of the world while learning English. Plus I'm a dork and enjoy learning about the world myself so it was my secret way to be a student again and learn new information.

I always go into new experiences with low expectations to eliminate any risk of me being disappointed and so it was with winter camps. But, my 6th grade students blew my low expectations out of the water (5th grade not so much but we won't talk about that). I had my students plan a dream vacation and expected destinations such as Korea, Japan, and China to pop up frequently. But no! My students' dream vacations: France (to see the Eiffel Tower), Germany (eat food and drink beer haha), Spain (to watch a bull fight), Greece (to see the Parthenon) and many more! Not only did my students choose non-typical Korean vacation spots but they used good English sentences to explain their reasons why they wanted to travel to these locations. Impressive!

Each day I enthralled my students with knowledge about each continent. I showed them pictures from my travels which drew responses such as: "Teacher! You very richy! You travel so muchy!" On Africa day I was very nervous about how my students would respond to the abundance of "black people" on this continent. In the past many of my students will gasp in horror when they see a black face, but I have tried to be optimistic that this response is only due to shocking lack of diversity in this country. To combat this lack of diversity and prove that Africans really are okay I intentionally overloaded my powerpoint on Africa with pictures of me and my African friends from my travels. Instead of gasps of horror the responses were:
-"Teacher! Boyfriend?"  "No, not boyfriend. Friend."
"Teacher! Husband? You have many husbands."
"Teacher! Children? Oh teacher you have many children!"
"No, no. No children." (me laughing and turning red which encouraged my students even more)
"Oh teacher! Your children miss you very muchy! Do you miss your children? Does your husband miss you?"

I take these responses as a victory! If my students are okay with me having African children and an African husband than they must be okay with Africans as a whole. Africa day was of course my favorite because I have such a personal connection to this continent (NOT country). I drilled into my students where my family lives and where Botswana is on a map. I can now proudly say that my Korean 6th graders (well 9 of them at least) know more about Africa than the average American. Please feel bad about yourselves now Americans and do your research on Africa. You should at minimum know where South Africa since they did just host the world cup.

The culminating activity for camp (besides the movie) was having my 6th graders write simple letters in English to the students of a school in Tanzania that our Engineers without Borders chapter worked with and Valparaiso University's SALT (Social Action Leadership Team) is raising money for this year. I showed my kids these two videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZpz1H49J9Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDgumswnwE8
The first video includes an interview with me so my students were convinced that I'm famous. I guess having your face in a youtube video classifies as fame, right?

With the letter writing activity I was once again blown away by my students. I gave them a very simple template to follow: what they like to do, their name, which school they go to, etc. However, I left the activity open. I told them they could write about Korea because the students in Tanzania don't know about Korea. One student in particular took this advice to heart. Instead of simply using the ample class time I gave my students to finish the letters he took his letter home and showed up the next day with a crammed (literally every inch was filled) full A4 paper sized letter. I was speechless! He was so shy about his extra work even when I praised him for all his efforts. This kid wrote about kimchi (Korea's national dish), how Korea is a divided country, how quickly Korea developed in the last 50 years, and how he wants to travel Africa (YES! :) ). Gold star work for sure and pat on the back to his great English teacher! ;)

These students and moments like these are the reasons why I do enjoy teaching at the end of the day. Yes, it's often mindless and I don't foresee myself teaching Korean elementary students for the rest of my life, but to risk sounding cliche--teaching is often about making a difference in just a few students' lives. I think winter camp fueled my growing passion to be a professor since I enjoy the act of teaching so much but find myself frustrated by the limited knowledge I can actually successfully impart on elementary students.

On the last day of camp my students left with sad faces to leave me which made me of course feel VERY good about myself. One of my favorite students: "Teacher! I don't want to go home! I want to study more!" Awww! How many teachers would give anything to hear that?