Candy Management

So, it’s been quite a while between my last post and now. Let me try to explain.

I am learning very quickly through my experiences that Korean’s are notoriously dis-organized businessmen. See, my contract start date was 1 July 2009, which fell three weeks before the week-long summer vacation for all Private English Schools in South Korea. This confounded me a bit before I left the US, but I let it slide off my back because, well, I didn’t have a job in the US, and wanted to get up and over to East Asia asap. However, what my employer forgot to inform me of before I left, was that the weeks leading up to the break were testing weeks, as most of the classes were finishing books they had been studying for the past six months. I was brought in to essentially teach them one chapter and test them.

Thus, while I was spending the first two weeks trying to not only get over jet lag, adapt to a foreign culture, but also organize the 17 courses I had just been handed, I was informed that I needed to prepare exams for these classes to be taken before my break. Nonetheless, the last couple of weeks have been pretty uneventful from a cultural exploration standpoint, yet have thrust me fully into my work. 

Beyond the  miscommunications that have plagued the employee-employer relationship, which from what I have been told is absolutely normal over here, the work has been fulfilling and rewarding. Like I said, I teach 17 different courses over about six hours each day, with a few classes repeating during the week. My classes could not be more different which forces one to mentally prepare oneself on an hourly basis. For, as you may imagine, Phonics-level eight-year-olds require quite a bit different approach than 14-year-old Advanced Reading and Writing courses. 

I begin each day with two hours of the little squirms who are at the basic level of their english education, usually between the ages of 6-8. They are rambunctious, loud, sweet, crazed, absolutely off the wall, and amazed by their teachers all at once. These classes read short, repeat, short story books that apply simple sentence structures and minimal vocab to childish stories about dreams of trains, animal friends, and the friendship between a little girl and a scary monster. The material is incredibly repetitive, the scholastic victories are small, but it keeps the kids entertained, and from time to time, a few of the students seem to grasp the concepts and walk out with some new knowledge. These classes tend to follow structure for only about 15-20 min before the kids lose all focus and force a reluctant Teacher Brian into a game. I don’t think I’ve played this much hangman and bingo since I was most of my students age!

At the end of the day, I have been advised not to struggle too much with actually “teaching” the students at this level. According to the school, they would rather the students leave with a smile on their face so their parents will continue to fund their tuition, than with a frown because their teacher tried to do his job. Now, I am still feeling my way around the system, and am all for making my students happy, but I did not come here to be a babysitter, and thus will be doing what I can to push harder for more structure in class than what I have experienced thus far. I truly hope that, in time, this is a battle I can overcome. 

On Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays I teach two Intermediate Reading, Analytical Thinking and Writing courses. These are by far my favorite classes both for the material covered, but also for the students within the classes. The students are the equivalent of middle school-ages, know enough english to converse and write fairly well, and are as funny and entertaining as they come. We read from a text book which alternates a non-fiction story with a fiction one, week to week, and two short story books that introduce a small amount of english literature through abridged stories.

The problems facing these classes are reflected in the issues with the structuring of my younger classes. Like all private institutions, english schools are a business which, unfortunately, seem to rely more on tuition levels and profits than on the production and education of its students. Many students are seemingly allowed to rise through the various levels and grades in the school without adequate knowledge of the subjects. As a result, teachers are discouraged, by their workload and the students time, to be persistent in pushing each young student to work to their full potential. Further, upon receiving a class of 12-year-olds who can “speak” english, yet cannot understand what it is they are speaking, I, as a teacher am overwhelmed by the course work we have in front of us, and the amount of backtracking I honestly should be doing to properly teach these students.

Its a delicate balancing act as a teacher, for you don’t want to hold the class back, but it is incredibly obvious that a few of my older students should never have passed their ESL 1 course. Even more, the majority of my time spent with these students is in assessment classes, which regularly tests  their understanding of the material they have read. Thus I have very little “teaching time” with them. I have tried to inject a few basic lessons about sentence structure and the daunting “topic sentence,” to no such avail, a clear result of ineffective time management, and over-working.

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These middle school-level classes put on high display the ignorance and inefficiency of the overall Korean Education System. From my perspective, it appears to seek to overwork their youth, and overwhelm them with more information, strictly information, than any mind at that age should have to handle. The intended goal is the best high school education possible, so one will be accepted into one of the five-to-ten Korean “Ivy League” Universities. High School, as a result is the most intensive educational period in a Korean youths life.

A typical day for a high schooler in Korea is to wake up and go to their school from 7:30-2, then spend anywhere between 3-5 hours at their English school, before returning home to complete all the homework assigned in two languages, for the next 12 hour day.

The kids can forget about physical activities, for there is no time to play baseball – a sport reserved for those handpicked children to play – soccer, basketball, or even to run around and burn off steam. As a result, many of these students physically develop in the strangest ways – not overweight, but not of any sort of ideal, with no knowledge of the importance of physical health – because their lives are spent in classrooms for 50 weeks of the year.

It’s an unfortunate sight to see, whereas far too many in the world are grossly undereducated and thus face a life full of barriers, here the students are almost overeducated. This discrepancy allows for no balance to be attained, prevents social networking, and forces many to choose their career path at far too young an age. The odds for success are still stacked against these students of memorization, not knowledge, for acceptance in college is all that matters, and the failure to attend the “right” school, will most certainly lead to a life just slightly above the poverty line.

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Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday evenings are dedicated to my recently graduated ESL 1 course, which begins ESL 2 next week. These kids are around the 10-11 year-old range, have minimal english skills, yet have great senses of humor, and for the most part, work hard for me. Though I do have a few trouble makers, one of whom I have protested against advancing course levels – to which my boss said, “No, he should be okay” –  the shining stars of the class, are, not surprisingly, the girls. They are excited by the material, work harder, and are always willing to participate, to the point where I have to discourage them in effort to get some answers out of the boys. The next six months will be dedicated to ESL 2, and I hope to see quite an improvement from these students. We have been working extensively on simple sentence structures, and I hope that by the time I leave them, they will be better prepared to write organized and readable essays than many of the students ahead of them. 

I also teach two levels of the Simple Steps of Writing courses on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday late afternoons. The younger students in the Level Two course are eight & nine, and the more advanced class (Level Five) is comprised of 12 & 13 year-olds. These classes read stories of birthdays, thieves, sporting events and hobbies, coupled with activities that teach them grammar and word choice. They then end each unit with a writing activity.

Like the previous classes I wrote about, the students here are an assortment of hard working intelligent young minds, and those who require quite a bit more attention and guidance. I had these classes do an extensive amount of writing in the first month to see where they were at, and will be honest in saying we have a lot of work to do, particularly in the higher level course. There is no excuse in my mind to explain why  students who have been taking english classes since they were six years old, have no clue how to write a Subject-Verb-Object sentence, or properly organize a five-paragraph essay. As this class has clearly shown, the positive about me arriving at the time that I did, was the opportunity to test these students and assess their abilities, so that I can now step back and formulate lesson plans which reflect what they really need to know. 

I end my Monday and Thursday nights with two different high school level classes which read abridged versions of advanced english literature, such as Huckleberry Finn and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am adamantly pushing to teach some of my personal favorite, Ernest Hemingway, in these classes, and hopefully by the fall we’ll be deep into The Gambler, The Nun & The Radio, exploring Papa’s distinctly peaceful view of death. 

These two classes could not be much different. My class on Monday is a tutorial course for an eighteen-year-old, bright, young engineer, who already has excellent english skills and is simply trying to improve his reading, writing and conversational skills. To say he is easy to teach would be an understatement. It is nothing short of a pleasure to teach him, for he is well versed in American culture and history, and constantly asks me for more information on America. I look forward to this class as the weekend comes to an end, knowing full well, that the two hours will fly by, and we will both walk away with quite a bit of knowledge gained. 

My upper-level reading course on Thursday nights, however, is a completely different story. The two boys in this class have put up a front that is all too familiar for parents of 14-year-old, awkward and moody boys. To ask them to read a passage in our books is similar to asking ones parents for the car for a weekend getaway….impossible. God forbid I try to stimulate a conversation among, “higher level” english speakers. This class inches forward like the last remains of winter in the chilling, and indecisive days of March. I am trying to come back from break with a new perspective on these students, try to lighten the class and make it more enjoyable for all parties. But when it all comes down to it, I was hired to teach, and I cannot, in goodwill, stray too far from the material needed to be taught. This class will be an ongoing work in progress, a twist of irony, for I hoped, upon applying for this job, to be teaching primarily to this age. Ce’st La Vie…

As you may have wondered, the title of this post reflects the fall back option to any problems in my younger classes. It is absolutely astounding to see the power that candy holds over children. If at any time I need to stimulate participation and focus, I begin granting students who answer questions correctly a small piece of candy. Not only does this result in a widespread array of hands thrust into the air, but it also makes the lesson seem that much more exciting for a period in time. The discovery of its effectiveness proved to be a great victory for me, one that I will resort to at any point that I see the kids need a boost of sugar. 

All in all, the classes have been going well. The students are fun, keep me entertained, and are excited to yell at you the newest english word or phrase they have learned. I love the enthusiasm and the drive for knowledge. Yet as I have described, the combination of disorganized schools, and an overwhelming school system leads to far too many problems that are all too clearly reflected in the majority of the students performance in school. I am learning quickly that many of these problems are far above me and my standing, and that it is not my job to become intertwined in things I cannot fix. Hopefully within time, I can develop a relationship with my employers that will allow me to dish out my two cents in efforts to improve the effectiveness of the school. Until then, I will continue to wander through this experience, wide-eyed, and excited for the next day to begin……

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