Day 265

Tuesday September 8

Just 100 more days and I will have been here for a year. wow.

I'm finally connected to a printer. It took them a long time. First one of the teachers used nate messengers and hooked my computer to the copier by using a remote. Then later they got in touch with Samsung and they controlled my computer remotely while I was in class and hooked me to a printer.

I had 2 new students in my class. One was a returning student from last semester. Now I have five students in my highest level which is the mid-level intermediate. My first speaking class of the day wasn't good. We went over 2 lessons. I looked over the material and I thought it might be enough to last all class. The time passes so quickly. It doesn't take long to do the activity. First we read all the questions together. Then we speak to our partner using the questions. We were going over various scenerios and they didn't understand. There is a prompt in the book telling them something like "ask you parents if your new friend can stay overnight?" They would read the statement just like that instead of coming up with a question. So then I went through the scenerios and gave them example answers "Can my new friend stay overnight?". We were finished with both lessons and had 15 mins of class left. One of the students asked if they could play a game and I agreed! the girls wanted to play but the boy didnt want to join in. They asked me to join their games so I did. I didn't know what else to do in class. I'm going to have to come up with extra material. These lessons in the current book are way too short and I don't know how to elaborate and make them longer. I have no guidance whatsoever. I don't even know how to give homework. How do you give homework for a speaking class? Its not like the books I had last semester where you have a theme and vocab words and questions. I'm not really teaching anything. Just giving them speaking practice. I'm going to have to bring extra questions to class so I don't go through the book too fast. There are 37 lessons and I guess we are using the books till Feb.(I have lesson plans up to Feb for some of my classes and the books stay the same in those classes) I will eventually have to start doing 1 lesson per class which is going to be hell!I hate the new books! And why do we have to do it for 6 months? It would be better to use the books for 3 months so I could cover more per class.

We covered 3 lessons in my second class. They were actually good. There are 2 boys in the class and there was enough material to last till the end of class. We talked about items and their use, the difference between items (camera vs video camera) and which do you like better?. We had a good class.

We had to go to the computer lab for my 3rd class. my c1 and c2 level class was combined so I had 6 students. They all had to create their user names for the English newspapers. They had an instruction sheet to tell them how to do it. The website is in Korean so i couldn't help! Then I had to get the students to go to the English newspaper site bc they were trying to look at other websites and play around with the computers changing the backgrounds. One student put a picture of Obama on the desktop as the background. They all seem to love Obama. Why? I don't know. I don't really know what we are suppose to be doing in this class. I just had them read the article and answer the quiz questions. Some of them found out that the quiz will tell you what you got wrong and they go take it again and get 100%. Oh my! I think I'll try a different tactic next week. Maybe we will read it as a class and I'll watch to make sure they aren't cheating. Some of them try to answer the quiz without reading the article. And its hard to keep up with what 6 children are doing at once. There were 4 kids on one side of the room and 2 on the other side so I had to keep going back and forth telling them what to do. Nobody even showed me what all the icons mean(they are written in Korean). I don't even know what I'm really suppose to be doing in that class.I guess its just something they think I should figure out on my own. The only way I knew there were quizzes was by clicking through all the links on my own since no one showed me what to do.

My last class was pretty good. We talked about the same lesson that I used in another class on Monday. We were talking about the police officer and the hospital. I just asked them questions about the picture and about what a police officer does and what people do in a hospital. We finished 5 mins early and played hangman.

I met another foreigner tonight. He came to the gym with Lesley. I was leaving when I met them. He's a new teacher at a school that opened in the same building as Lesley's school.

I'm planning a trip to the beach this weekend. I was reading on Dave's ESL cafe about beaches in Korea and someone said Mangsang was really nice. I looked at the website and it does look nice..Its a long trip but at least I get to get out and see more of Korea. I can take an express bus and it will be a 3 hour trip. While I'm riding i'll get to see other places in Korea. I haven't ventured too far from Seoul. The website claims that Mangsang beach is the number 1 beach on the east coast of Korea.It has clean and shallow water and white sands. Cleanest water in the country.

I need to start getting out more. On the weekends I need to get on one of the express buses or KTX and just go different places.