Hello today!
Before I say anything else, I want to give you this update: my luggage has arrived! I haven't yet gotten it because it's waiting in Don's office at the school, but it is here. I will be retrieving it this afternoon, and finally I'll have some new clean clothes. Woo hoo! No more dirty, smelly Ben.
Now last time I didn't explicitly explain something at the very end of my message: teachers at my school are referred to as (name) teacher, thus I'm called Ben teacher by both students and other staff members (usually when being referred to when students are around). Before I came over here, I wondered what I would be called. Usually when I've worked with kids before, they would call me "Mr. Ben" or something like that. That seems to be the American trend, at least in the upper Midwest. I've never really been fond of that title, so when I found out about "Ben teacher," I was overjoyed. I don't think I let on too much, but that's definitely one of my favorite things to hear when talking with kids. And I do think it's funny because many of the kids will call my Brian teacher by accident, so we'll see how long it takes for me to fully cement my place among them.
I've been rather surprised and very pleased by the way students and teachers interact at my schools. Granted, I don't know how this applied to public schools, but in my schools, which are private schools, called Hogwans, it seems that there's almost as much hanging out with the kids as there structured sessions of instruction. In some ways, I've felt a little like both a babysitter and a teacher when interacting with the kids. My kids are very affectionate. They will hug and climb and pull and even a couple have kissed me or another teacher. There was one funny boy in particular who, after kissing Matt teacher, said, "Matt teacher is delicious." And, granted, you can't hear the right tone through these characters on a page, but the way he said it, his voice and the look of his face presented a perfect, hilarious, precious picture. I heartily laughed when I heard the story.
Additionally, the older kids have shown me some extra kindness with a couple gifts. One girl gave me a notebook and pencil, which are pocket-sized and have already been put to good use. I've been carrying them around and jotting down things to remember for later -- either because I need to know the information for something else I must do or so that I can write to you about something interesting I encountered. And another girl gave me an iced coffee. Oh, what great students I have.
More about the schools: both of my schools are exclusively English schools. Now, in the kindergarten we do teach about other subjects, but we go through that material in English, obviously so that students can build up their word banks and better understand larger contexts and concepts. In the older classes, we focus on reading and writing and speaking. In these classes, we don't branch out much beyond what I would typically think of as an English literature text book, so I wouldn't have science or math lessons with these classes, whereas with the younger kids these topics will come up weekly.
Also, in the mornings I spend time with the Kindergarten-aged kids because they don't have school outside of what we're doing. On the other hand, older students have English classes in the afternoon because they have their normal classes for the bulk of the day. This aspect is very different from what I personally experienced in school, but then again, I wasn't trying to learn native fluency in another language during my middle/high school years.
So this past week I did get to spend 2 days shadowing Brian, and then, because Brian covered for another teacher, Friday I mostly taught on my own, which was very interesting. Before I came here, after finding out the age groups I would be teaching, I was most excited for working with the youngest kids, but if my first day's experience holds true for any length of time, I may end up enjoying the older kids more. I did struggle a bit with both groups of kids, and it was different for each time. With the younger kids, I had trouble with transition times, moving from one topic or book to another. I think this stems from simply not knowing the class resources as well as I could (hence the reason that right now there's a stack of school books sitting on a shelf in my room -- waiting to be explored before going back to school tomorrow morning). Additionally, and this simply part of starting something new, I need to learn the flow of the class; how much time should we spend with this book or that, or, more accurately, how much time do we need to spend with this or that? These next few days are going to be interesting, to say the least.
With the older kids, I ran into a different problem; I spent too much time focusing on the little things. In one class, for example, we were making comparisons, and the students didn't use/had some difficulty with articles before any nouns. So then I tried to explain it the whole group, but as I checked individual sheets, I saw the the same problems persisted. Afterward I ended up talking with Don, and he just reminded me that I am one teacher in the each students' academic career, so I don't have to make everything perfect right now. As a perfectionist by nature, that's a difficult perspective to maintain, but it's truly what I need to hold onto. Thus with the older students I ended up going more slowly than I had anticipated, but it was only the first day; lost ground can be recovered at this point.
I realize that I've already sent out one message today, but I wanted to get this one out also … before it becomes too old of news. We'll see if you get it today or tomorrow. For now, though, I'll leave you with funniest, most interesting story from the first day: teaching 6 year olds about sperm and eggs. Haha. Yes, I hope that was the response most of you had when you saw it at the end of my last entry. As it turns out, Korean kids learn about basic reproduction at a very early age, and I think that's kind of cool. There's nothing about sex, but still, this is so much more than many American parents would want their kindergarteners to learn in class. I just took pictures of the workbook, so check out the Facebook album to see all the pages we covered … and even a few that I have yet to teach next week. So basically, now that I've started to teach the kids about the birds and the bees, everything else is just water under the bridge, right? Right.
Alright. Stay tuned, next time you'll find out my new favorite karaoke song, learn how difficult it is to climb the highest mountain in the world [within city limits] and get the scoop on my new digs.
Much love to you all.
pfn,
bg
ps- if you want to see that pages and other images of the school, visit:
ps- I've also updated some other albums a little bit, so visit:
No comments:
Post a Comment