Day 120

April 16, Thursday

I've almost made it through 7 weeks at my new job.
I've been in South Korea for 17 weeks.
I get to go home in @318 days. I'm not exactly sure what the date will be..somewhere around March 1st.


I finally have a table. Its a small table with 2 chairs.

Classes were good today.

My first class has 11 students and most of the time they don't understand the directions so it takes longer. I am behind in that class because I have to spend more time explaining things and trying to get them to stop talking to one another. They also begged me to play a game one day so we didn't get as much done as we should have on that day. I've got to start covering more material, but also making sure they understand.

In my 2nd class we covered 4 pages and then I let them play a game. I don't want to cover too much material. The lessons are short and the students grasp the concepts. Today we were talking about food. The students kept talking about how hungry they were after learning about food. We played a game where one person would say a word and everyone had to say a new word from the last letter of that word. Example--Fish. The next person has to think of a word that starts with H. We played that for about 10 minutes. This class loves to play games. I need to find games that can relate to the lesson.

In my 3rd class they loved the spelling race using our vocabulary words for the unit. We got finished with the words in our unit and they wanted to go back to previous units to spell those words also. I'd say the word and one person would start and everyone adds a letter until the word is spelled.

In my 4th and 5th classes we went over writing exercises.

Next week I have to assign more essays. This is going to be difficult again. The lower level classes don't know how to write. I don't teach them writing and I can't take time away from speaking class to teach writing, but I have to assign an essay every month. Getting the students to turn them in is a hassle. I'm just going to give them a week to do their first draft and if you they don't turn it in on the due date then too bad--they get a zero. I have been begging the students every class for their essays and some still haven't given them to me. This time I'm just giving zeros and I'll be lowering their "assignment" grade on their report card. I hate giving essays! I don't want to give essays to the lower levels, but I have to! I can't believe these students don't know what an essay is. Most of them are in 6th grade and they don't know how to write an essay. For some of them I basically have to write the sentences out for them and let them fill in the blank which isn't helping them learn grammer. All they are doing is copying what I wrote.

I also hate tests! I gave all of my Tues/Thurs classes their weeking test for speaking class today.

Soon I'll have the task of making a monthly writing test-4 of them will be easy to make because I can use exercises out of the writing book. I don't teach writing to 5 of my classes. I don't see why the 5 classes have to have a writing test. No one is teaching them how to write. Last month I made it too hard-a lot of them didn't understand or didn't do well. I don't know what to put on a writing test for classes that I don't teach writing to. I thought it was easy but they had a hard time understanding how to find an error in a sentence and putting words out of order and making them put them in the right order to form a sentence.