Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Gimje, Korea, picture, School on March 31, 2009|
I finally got a chance to take a few more pictures of the Geumseong Girl’s Middle School in Gimje, where I teach on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
This is the entrance to the school, the big windows are the administration office…
This is the building I teach in…
A few views of my classroom…
my office…
and finally…
real flowers growing in March!
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I arrived in South Korea on September 16th, last year, I started teaching on the 23rd of September. Today, March 24th is approximately the halfway point in my stay here in Korea. The first half of my stay has been quite instructive, interesting, fun, and aggravating (often all at the same time…). In my remaining time I expect less of all of these adjectives, since I am getting more and more settled into the ‘feel ‘ of life here.
So far I’ve accomplished a number of my goals, first of which was to gain experience teaching English to non-speakers (something that I expect almost all teachers in the USA to have to experience sooner or later…). I should mention that this experience is often hard won, for instance, this semester I have nearly 800 middle school students I teach on a weekly basis!
While I go on about teaching, this might be a good place to add a picture of my ‘new’ school (the Geumseong Girl’s Middle School in Gimje South Korea). I teach over 440 7th and 8th grade girls in this school!
Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Gimje, picture, School on March 20, 2009|
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This semester I started teaching at a girl’s middle school to go along with the three days a week I teach at the boy’s middle school. The reception I got from the 7th and 8th grade girls was something I last saw when I was watching the movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. I have nearly 400 new best friends who scream whenever they see me. I am now the most popular person at this school.
Of course it’s easy to understand this intellectually, but having gone through this, I can tell you that this is a singular experience. The faculty is spoiling me here too. Almost every morning I arrive to the school where I am ceremoniously presented with a cup of coffee (in a china cup and saucer!). For an established coffee drinker this is in ooh la la territory! In the next several weeks I hope to show you a few pictures of the school. I don’t however show pictures of any of my students, regardless of how charming or cute they may be, just because I don’t have their (or their parents) permission… sorry, because all of them are really cute kids!
On another small topic, today as I walked to the bus stop I say the first blossoms of spring! This is still March (albeit March 20th…), but coming here from Minnesota, this is something that is quite amazing.
Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Korea, links on March 8, 2009| 2 Comments »
It seems that The Republic of South Korea is a little sensitive about internet mapping of South Korea. You can try to map this in Google Maps.com and get almost nothing, but if you go to www.maps.google.co.kr you can see a few things….
(I should mention that because of this caveat put forth by the Korean Government, I can’t embed this map!!). For those of you who don’t read Korean, if you look for the 712 street in the middle of this map, you will see a school directly below it… this is the Gimje (Boy’s) Middle School (a light brown square) where I have been teaching since September. If you look directly about the 712, you will see the Gimje Woman’s Middle School where I am now teaching at for two days a week. If you follow the 712 to the bottom of the map you will see a colored ‘GS’ logo, this is where I have my bus stop to and from my apartment in Jeonju (about 15 miles away…). As you can also see, there are plenty of other schools in this relatively close view of the southern part of Gimje. Near the boy’s school (across the street…) is an elementary school, and at the top of the map is the Gimje Girl’s High School.
Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Gimje, Korea, picture, School on March 6, 2009|
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It seems like I’ve been away from teaching in Gimje South Korea for an eon… I finished the Fall semester on December 24th, and I finally got back to the job this week. While I taught at the Gimje boy’s school last semester, now I also teach at the nearby Gimje Woman’s Middle School (this is their title, it is a girl’s school).
About four blocks down the same street you can find my new school too!
Teaching at both schools is a blast so far. At the girl’s school (a private parochial school), I am quite an exotic figure (2 meters tall, bald, and very old, plus I’m American!), consequently I have been treated like a rock star by my students (all 350 of them!) so far this week! Things are going along well at the boy’s school this semester too, many of my students are former students of mine and are quite a lot of fun to deal with.
Here is a shot of the Boy’s School entrance area…
At the school, my ‘office’ has been moved to the ‘student’ building on the third floor… Things are slowly getting back to normalcy.
Over at the Girl’s school I only have a first attempt shot from down the alley (more to come later)
The school is actually quite pretty, but can only be accessed by going down some very narrow twisting alleyways.
All in all I am very happy with my current situation , and that is good since I will be teaching at these two school for the next 20 weeks!
P.S. the hot lunches at both schools are great!
Posted in English, Korea, School, tagged Gimje, Korea, School on March 2, 2009|
I finally started the Spring Semester at the Boy’s Middle School in Gimje South Korea, it now looks like I will be teaching thereon Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I will be teaching at the nearby Gimje Woman’s Middle School (I think that this is a private school…). Since these two schools are about three or four blocks away from each other, I can still use the same bus stop (this is a pretty big deal for me, being a full time pedestrian here!).
I will be teaching about the same number of classes, just distributed over the week a little differently than the previous fall semester. I should also mention that this week will be taking up an inordinate amount of my time (i.e. this is the first week back at the job…), this means that I might be a little shy of my mark for posts in the next several days.
Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Korea, picture, School on February 19, 2009|
After working at the winter language camp for Woosuk University in January (the first three weeks) I was given the rest of the month as vacation (albeit without any practical computer access, see previous posts…). For February I was given the task of showing up at the main tower at Woosuk University for two hours a day fielding seven different ten minute calls from some of the language camp alumni. This ‘work’ struck me then as now as rather bizarre. Ten minute phone calls with 4th and 5th grade students couldn’t have any appreciable impact on their English proficiency, but Woosuk University is calling the shots, not me.
In any case, while I spent the afternoons of my first week of February at this tower I decided to at least take a few pictures.
Some of the ‘haze’ in these pictures is because the windows of this tower were quite dirty, but there is a very noticeable haze covering most of Jeonju almost all of the time (to me, it really looks like smog…).
All of these pictures were taken from my perch on the 9th floor of the 24 floor tower at Woosuk University in Samnye South Korea.
here is the tower…
so… these pictures may give a (very) small amount of context to my what I have been doing this month…
Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Gimje, Korea, picture, School on December 11, 2008| 2 Comments »
So, now you understand the situation I was in when I started to teach at the Gimje Boys’ Middle School. My first days were where I was thrust into the classes with no preparation. As I have mentioned several times in earlier posts (and is the name of this blog…), once again I was confronted with answers to questions that differed pretty greatly from reality. I walked into my first class with the understanding that I was going to be there for about five to ten minutes. As I walked in, my supervising teacher told me I was to teach for the whole hour!
Yikes!!!
In any case for that first week I developed whatever skills I have at filibustering and BS’ing to new levels (and for those who know, this would have been something awesome to see!). I spent some time just trying to develop a rapport with all of the students in every class. The biggest hit was that I actually shook the hand of every student in every class (an ‘American’ mark of friendship!). Even now, I probably shake hands with about 15 to 20 students a day, and give high 5’s to at least 40 a day, every day!
I also spent some time showcasing the area I am from in the USA (northern Minnesota). Consequently, most of my students know about some of the smaller towns and cities from the environs of Itasca County. they know about wild rice, deer hunting, ice fishing (some still don’t believe it, even when shown pictures!), and a variety of other things that are ubiquitous in Grand Rapids.
For this semester, I decided that the best thing I could do would be to develop a means to socialize the students to some pretty simple rules. For instance, I work with the classes by rows (they sit in rigidly defines rows of desks), this way I can get groups of 5 or 6 students to work as a group. this is working relatively well now, but it has taken some time to get this to work smoothly in every one of my classes.
Now I am dealing with these groups of students in an effective but lively manner. For this beginning work I spent time getting the students inured to the process I put in place. I start the hour with ‘bell work’ , in this case, every class teaches me a new word in Korean every week, and they get to test me on it the next week. after this we work on something that looks to them as a game, but in actuality is an exercise in developing familiarity in working as a group. I know I am making progress when I can see that these groups are getting competitive with each other (these are middle school boys!).
Right now I am in the position of starting to wind down to the end of the semester (it’s potentially under 10 class days left…). I can’t make to rigid a schedule since I can’t get an answer as to when the end of the semester actually takes place )I’ve already asked, but they haven’t made a decision yet!).
Posted in English, Korea, School, Teaching, tagged Gimje, links, picture, School on December 11, 2008|
When I first arrived at the Gimje Middle School back in September I was confronted with the prospect of teaching 13 different classes (each with at least 35 students) with no curriculum (let alone any educational standards to follow…). My job entails my helping these students develop their conversation abilities.
This was the first of my challenges to deal with. I needed to create some effective manner of interacting with all of these students so as to facilitate their developing the ability to speak in English.
I suppose I should digress a bit to allow my readers in the USA to understand how Korean schools may differ from American schools. In America (and many western countries), the classroom is essentially occupied by the teacher, and the students ‘visit’ the classroom. In Korea the students ‘own’ the classroom ,and teachers visit. This means that between classes the teachers leave and scenes from LORD of the FLIES take place. I can say without any hyperbole that these rooms and hallways sometimes sound like a monkey house. Mayhem often rules in the time between classes.
I also need to insure that you understand that you understand that for many of these young boys, this is the only time they have to ‘let it loose’ (in essence, to be boys). This is the result of the differences inherent in the Korean education system. Students go to school for about eight hours, then go home for a quick meal, and then go to the ‘Academy’ (in Korean this is Hagwon 학원) for anywhere from two to another six hours. This is every day of the week (and Saturdays too!). Students go to the academies during their school vacations too. So, when I say that many of these boys may be a little keyed up, you can be sure I speak the truth.
So, now you know what I was looking at when I first started teaching English Speaking and Conversation.
Posted in English, School, tagged Gimje, Korea, School, video on October 19, 2008|
This is the room where I spend time between classes, create lessons and keep up with the news (online). This is also where I give my 1-on-1 lessons to the Korean English teachers I work with. This is essentially my home away from home for most of the next year.
yes AND/OR no 