Teaching

On the last blog entry I didn't get an opportunity to talk about my job, teaching English to first, fourth and sixth grade students at Geumbok Elementary School in Dongtan. Both Paul and I work as ESL teachers for the GEPIK programme, which covers public schools in the Gyeonngi Province, the area surrounding Seoul. Any public school programme is South Korea is very competitive to get into as the conditions are much better than Hagwons, the private English schools.

I was pretty surprised when I turned up at my school on my first day to discover I was to receive no training. Instead I had one day of observing classes before standing up in front of a class of forty kids the following day to teach! Gulp! However, I have a Korean co teacher in the class at all times to help communicate the lessons to the kids and deal with classroom management so it wasn't too bad.

I have struck it very lucky with my co teachers, Yun-ok and Hae-kyoung. They are both lovely people, very laid back and supportive. As I teach most of my lessons with Yun-ok as well as sit beside her in the office, not getting along with her could have made life very difficult. Thankfully, she is great. She even visited Edinburgh a few years ago so she loves looking at photographs of back home.

Geumbok is a big school so I only actually teach around five lessons a week to different classes. I am pretty lucky in this sense as it means I only have five lessons to prepare. The actual content of the lessons comes from the English textbook which is generally very boring so it is up to me and my co teachers to come up with games and powerpoint presentations to make it a bit more interesting for the kids. There is no textbook for my first grade lessons on a Friday so I have to come up with the material from scratch, a task I found very daunting at first. When I asked Yun-ok what to do with the first graders she gave me a few songs to sing with them and told me that was enough. Twenty minutes into the forty minute lesson, I had sung all the songs with them several times and was beginning to break out in a cold sweat. For the next set of classes I used some materials online along with Paul's first grade book to come up with some presentations to show them involving numbers and sums.

At the moment, my main challenge with teaching is classroom management, particularly the first and sixth graders. The first graders are cute but they get bored very easily and it is hard to keep forty six year olds sitting in their seats, listening to what you are saying. The sixth graders are around eleven years old so they are practically teenagers, which means they can get very rowdy. It's okay at the moment because my co teachers do all the disciplining but I am very aware that without them, I would be screwed.

In general, I am really enjoying my job. I can't imagine any other position I could be in where I am greeting with enthusiastic waves and cries of "hello Maureen teacher!" every time I walk down the corridor. I am making sure I savour every minute of this incredible experience.