We started our first Monday here at the school. I got in there and right away I thought that they are not as well behaved as I thought they would be. I just pictured perfect quiet and well behaved Asian kids. I shadowed Steve, the teacher I was replacing, but only for a couple days. It’s more of a thing you just have to hit head on and learn yourself. When I finally got into the classroom on my own, the kids were a lot louder and very full of energy. A lot louder is probably an understatement. The younger ones are really cute. Maybe it will be hard to get mad at them, or maybe not...
The classrooms are all pretty small, which is fine when there’s only between 4 and 12 kids in each class. There is wallpaper of colourful things like flowers and school buses in each room. Thankfully, they all have A/C in each room. It gets really hot with the big windows, especially in the summer. The classes are nice and small, and I don’t know how teachers in grade schools in Canada deal with upwards of 30 students. The marking alone would take so much time. It’s hard keeping just a few kids in their seats, or from hitting each other. The classes are only 40 minutes for me. They are actually 80 minutes, but my kids have a Korean teacher work with them for the other half, or a different foreign teacher. I have younger kids when I go in around lunch for a couple periods. I’m also teaching drama and educational games to the kindergartners once each day. By the end of the day I’m teaching middle school kids. It’s a broad range of teaching subjects, levels, and class problems. That’s good because nothing is boring and it changes. I probably couldn’t survive until 8pm if I was teaching the little kids the whole time. I pretty much just teach by a workbook that all the kids have. There’s not much prep for each class. That part is nice, but there also is no structured time to do my own thing or to be very creative.
Korea as a whole is really paranoid about germs and H1N1, but the school takes it about one step further. Each teacher has a bottle of spray hand-sanitizer and we’re supposed to spray the kids each class. I usually only do it if class ends early and I fill time with that, or if they are bugging for it. The supervisor also checks each child’s temperature everyday within at least 20 minutes after they arrive at school. We’ve heard horror stories of other schools closing because of swine fly and the teachers losing vacation time, or worse: their jobs.
The kids put in a lot of hours at schools. They go in the morning for their regular school, which is public or private. Our Hogwon (basically a private English school) only has the kindergartners and elementary school students in the morning. They usually go to another Hogwon in the afternoon, or more, for English or something else. Some of the kids that are here for only 80 minutes also go to schools for piano, Taekwando, science, math, etc. They spend a lot of their night practicing or doing homework. And they even go to schools on Saturday. Thankfully we aren’t open Saturdays. Sunday they mostly do homework, or finally relax. It’s really intense but it’s normal for them. I feel bad for getting mad when they don’t have their homework done. Some cry easily too, since they’re under so much pressure and stress. The kids at our hogwon are probably pretty rich, and the parents expect a lot of attention and progress.
The other teachers are really helpful. At first it was hard to get the hang of it. It’s a weird structure and format. We had also started right away into the work plus time difference on top of everything. We also weren’t in our apartment yet at first. Now it’s a lot easier that I have the hang of it and I’m used to the kids and the routine.
I don't have a lot of pictures (or any) from the school yet, but that will come eventually.
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