Day 257

Monday August 31

This is insane. I have to be at school for 7 hours to teach one class.

I got a book list today of all the books I'll be using for the upcoming semester. When do we begin classes? I don't even know. We don't have a schedule today. I also got a lesson plan for some of my classes. We have a schedule of when we are suppose to teach in the book. It's just like Avalon. At least it cuts down on making a lesson plan. or trying to figure out how many pages I want to cover in class.

I got my books for the conversation class. I was told I had to make copies because the students weren't buying the book. So I made 14 copies because I had 14 kids in the class. 6 of them actually had books so I made more copies than I needed.

10 of the students were in class today. I knew all of them except one. I taught the rest of them in elementary classes last semester.

I'll be teaching this particular class every Monday from 6-6:55. Its only once a week. I'm not sure if I have to give tests and homework for this class. I don't know how you would test a conversation class. There's not much prep work for the class or much teaching. I just explain the vocabulary and let them talk. Today the class went okay. We were learning about introductions. I couldn't get the cd player to work so we couldn't listen to the cd. I just had them repeat after me. Some of them don't want to talk to each other. That's frustrating when you are trying to teach conversation and you can't get them to conversate with each other. There was a part in the book where they had to introduce themselves to a group. The shy girl that I had in elementary class is in this class and she wouldn't speak. Then later I asked them to ask questions to 3 people in the class and write their answers. They didn't ask. They just passed the book around to 3 people and had them write. Oh my. Hopefully they will be better as the semester progresses. I have 14 more classes with them. The Korean teacher said that there would be 15 classes, but it only goes through November which is 13 weeks. Not 15.

The students were asking me to spell Korean words. If they would have asked me a few months ago I wouldn't have had a clue! But now I'm actually studying korean so I can write the word in Korean and English. One student asked me 'how do you spell 'jeong'?" and I wrote it in Korean on the board. I asked her if that was was she was asking. Then I wrote it in English. Another student asked me how to spell something. I told him to write it in Korean and I'd write it in English.

Since I'm having a hard time getting them to talk I think I'm going to start them out with 100 points and if they don't participate I'm going to take away 5 points each class. I might even put them into teams and give away pieces of candy like suckers as motivation to do things the right way. The winning team gets a bonus point and a sucker.

Now I have to sit at my desk doing nothing from 7-9. It's quite boring.

I went to Kims club to get some groceries. I got some fruit. I also got some froot loops. I walked past them at first bc the price was ridiculous. Then the gravitational pull was so strong I just had to go back and get them! Even if they were $5.50 for one of the large boxes. oh well.

Then i went home and ate a lot of froot loops.