Sunday, July 19, 2009

Teaching in Korea

So I thought I take a second to talk about my new job in Gwangju.
The teaching has been a bit of a change for me. Not only am I dry and in a classroom, but instead of 4 kids max I'm teaching classes of 10-14 kids. Also, the ages seem to be significantly older than I'm used to. Most of my kids are between 8-12. But the kids are interesting to say the least. Here are a few things I've encountered so far in the classrooms.

1. Apparently there are several words in the English language that sound similar to Korean curse words. It took me quite a bit of time to figure this one out. The one that made my kids laugh was "huh". I use it all the time. I never did find out what it means, but I spent several days thinking I just had a giggly class. Every time I said "huh", which I learned was quite frequent, the kids would ask me to say it again and burst out laughing. After a couple of days they slipped and let me know that it was funny because it was also some type of dirty word.

2. Korean kids usually get hit in their classes, so being the teacher without a stick can be a little frustrating. They don't seem to respect the Foreign teachers as much because they know the worst we can do to them is send them in the corner, or send them to their Korean teacher, who will then yell at them and hit them. It is a viable threat, but somewhat difficult to carry out. Mostly I put kids in corners. Today I had three kids in the corner at one time. They wouldn't stop talking Korean, which is a big no no here. Other than that, usually after one kids goes into the corner, the other kids know you mean business and they shut up. If not, the next kid has to go to the corner holding a trash can. You can make them do a squat position in the corner as well. I haven't tried that yet, but may have to in the near future.

3. Korean doesn't use the same sentence structure or word usage as English (obviously). It makes for some very interesting sentences because they try to speak Korean to you using English words. I get a kick out of some of the things they write. At some point early on we must teach them the word Suddenly because it shows up in papers in the weirdest places. "Suddenly I opened the door" "Suddenly it was Saturday".

4. One of my new favorite sounds is confused Korean children. "Whaaaaaaa????" I hear it continually. "Teacher, whaaaaa????" "Teacher, are you Kurazzy?" They get very excited about all of it. Sometimes when we're doing difficult words or concepts I can get the whole class to do it. I may have to record it because it makes me laugh every time.

5. Most Korean kids are looking to be teacher's pets. The kids here share much more than in America, and continually share their snacks with me. I've pretty much always eaten what they give me, but occasionally I eat something they've handed me and then watch them lick their fingers and put them back in the Ramen bag or what not and question my decision. Mostly I just think it's cute that they want to share with their teacher. I did have to ban Spicy Ramen from my class the other day. They couldn't stay focused because their mouths were burning.

Mostly the kids are pretty good, although pretty rowdy. I do think it's a disadvantage that they can speak a language that I can't but I'm remedying that as fast as possible. It's also unfortunate that they know there's not much I can do to them other than send them to someone to beat them. But for the most part I can clap my hands and they quiet right down. They're very smart children.

Some interesting side notes.

This morning I went for a hike by myself. I didn't think about it, but it was the first time I'd been out by myself. Usually when Steve and I go out, no one does much more than stare a little too long at us. We rarely get approached by strangers. When I was out by myself, probably 10 people approached me to say "hello". One time it was a car full of very old men and when I waved and said "hello" back, they started to laugh and giggle like school girls. I found it highly amusing. I guess they don't feel comfortable approaching people in a group, but when there's just one of me, they want to say hello. Before any one gets nervous, it was all harmless attention. They weren't really interested in anything other than my skin and eye color. It was strange, but funny.

I got some very funny papers today on Global Warming. The Korean teachers talked to them about the effects (well I did too, but I guess they went over it with the Korean teachers as well, because I saw stuff in the papers that I hadn't taught them. The thing that cracked me up was that most of them think that the world is ending. Several of them think that islands and countries are sinking under the water. One of them stated that Korea is going to sink under water and while some people might say that we can all go up to the mountains, she doesn't think that this will work because she thinks the water level will cover the mountains as well. One of them said all of this and added that it's too late to do anything except curb it's effects, but we're stuck with a screwed up planet. But the thing that they all agreed on was that global warming is killing polar bears, and we need to stop it. Let me tell you that it got Steve a little riled up.

Anyhow, so far so good.

Hope everyone has a great evening!

Miranda

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