Jo's Korean Adventures

After spending three months travelling around SEAsia, and then going back to Canada for three months... Jo has decided to come back to Korea for a third stint as an English teacher in a public school. Read about Jo, and her new outlook.

Small Improvements count

SOUTH KOREA | Friday, 22 June 2007 | Views [395] | Comments [1]

What a week! This past week I have been giving conversation tests to each student one-on-one. I am testing their knowledge of the lessons we have covered thus far. I was very happy to see that they have improved since the first time I interviewed them during the first week of March. I made five conversation questions to test what level each student was at when I started teaching in March. There was one similiar question that I added to the conversation interview this week.

The one thing that most of the grade six students didn't know was, "when is your birthday?" Over the last four months, one thing I did teach them was the months, and ordinal numbers. The majority of the students could answer this question this week. I was quite pleased about it. I remember when I first asked this question to them in March, I got weird stares, and most of them can say their birthdays like 5/10. They also don't know what year they were born in. What a bad habit that the Koreans have, in teaching the students their birthdays using number short form, and not saying the month or ordinal number.

The students seemed to do better in conversation then in the writing test that we gave them last week. I am not overly surprised at this, because the textbook has two sentences for them to copy. I spent a bit of time on writing during class, but have only forty minutes to do it all. Unfortunately, I only teach 80 minutes a week on one theme. The other eighty minutes is from the textbook; which my co-teacher teaches.

Another exciting thing happened this week. I started teaching an afternoon English class to Grade one students. I really miss my little ones from working in the 'hogwan' last year. I taught kindergarten, and loved that class to death. So, this week was challenging, because they barely know a word of English except their ABC's. At least they know that.

Today I played a fun game, and had them make funny team names for each pair. We had the tigers, rabbits, cats, rainbow, and Korea fighting team. I got to do some funky drawings on the whiteboard and act like they were going down a ski hill. They had to answer my questions based on what I was teaching them. If they got the right answer then they could move slowly down the ski hill.

I was acting as if I was each animal, and I got them laughing so hard. I really miss my kindergartens for that. Little kids love when you get a bit 'nutty' and act out things. I have seven weeks of teaching them left, and I can see their progress everyday. There is only ten students in the class so I get to know them more. I like that part of only teaching ten as opposed to 38 in my other classes.