Teaching Tactics

Teaching English is getting easier with each lesson. I am falling into the routine of reviewing what I taught in the previous class and introducing a new, yet related topic, drilling the vocabulary / key expressions, implementing a game / activity, and wrapping up with a brief conclusion. Powerpoints are also getting easier to make. I just copy slides and images from previous presentations, then tack on more slides with different colors and pictures to keep the kids engaged.

More often than not, my classes fail to go as I intend. I'll start with my review and suddenly be on my activity twenty minutes before I want to. Or my lesson will segue into another topic, and I will teach the students about something that I didn't even think of until that moment.

Today I attempted to teach the alphabet.

First of all, I might have showed up 15 minutes late to my own class. I am scheduled to teach kindergarten from 12:45pm-1:15pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I came up to my class at 12:35pm only to find my entire class and my translator there. I was confused because everyone was 10 minutes early, so I gestured at the teacher if class was still at 12:45pm by pointing at the clock and holding up four fingers, then five. She nodded yes. [Disclaimer: Even though she is the school's English teacher, she doesn't speak a lick of English. Anything she communicates to me -- whether it be a nod or a gesture -- cannot be taken seriously.] So I am sitting there at 12:40pm, and everyone else is just sitting there waiting. Awkward. I gesture at her whether I should just start the class, and I think she was confused because she didn't really respond, but I took a slight nod as a 'yes' so I began. I stretched the class out to 1:15pm, then looked at my time table to see that my next class was scheduled for 1:00pm-1:40pm. (Oh yeah, Wednesdays are shorter days, so all of my regular classes are 40 minutes earlier. Kindergarten is an irregular class.) Long story short, I was confused and later brought up the issue to my mentor teacher, who was also confused....then later he told me that Wednesday's kindergarten class would have to be moved to another day. I picked Tuesday.

So as I was saying, today I attempted to teach the alphabet. Teaching kindergarten sucks because the kids don't know what I am talking about and neither does my translator half of the time. 2nd grade was a little easier, but I can tell that they still get lost in translation.

--Example Dialogue--
Me: Hello!
Class: Hello!
Me: Good afternoon!
*cricket cricket*
Co-teacher (not the other translator I was talking about): *translates to them in Korean*
Class: Good afternoon!
Me: How are you?
Class: How are you?

Fail.

My 4th grade class is my favorite. They actually understand me enough to get really excited about the activities and are very eager to repeat the vocabulary / dialogue that I teach them. At times, they can be really rowdy, but my co-teacher (Hannee) does a great job at raising her voice and keeping them under control. She also understands me enough to translate effectively, so no one is lost in translation.

My 6th grade class had four students on the first day and only two students for the past two days. Both boys are pretty well-behaved as boys go and pick up the dialogue at a reasonable pace. They are also friends, so the class is easy-going and fun. Today, I segued from the alphabet to an improvised lesson about the difference between the "L" sound and the "R" sound. In the Korean alphabet, one of the characters is between the "L" and "R" sound, which is why native Korean speakers struggle with those letters in the English language. I drilled them with familiar vocabulary that contained both consonants, which greatly improved their pronunciation by the end of the class. I am changing "Engrishee" to "English" one student at a time.

I now carpool home with two of the staff. On the ride home, they teach me at least 5 new words everyday. My vocabulary is slowly expanding with the cultural immersion. Many of the staff also want me to teach them English, but I think it will be a bit difficult because I do not know the key expressions in Korean to be able to translate it to them in English. I'll have to figure that out later.