Day 330

Thursday November 12

wow...I've been here 47 weeks. 15 weeks in Korea. 14 of those will be teaching weeks. If I were motivated enough I'd count down the actual school days, but I'm not that motivated yet. I'm just counting days till my contract is over which is 108.

I had a good day today.

My first class was good. We were doing a writing unit on varying sentence lengths, simple and compound sentences. For homework they have to write a how to paragraph to tell me how to do or make something. They all did good on the new material. We finished a few pages and I gave them a few mins of free time.

My 2nd class was also pretty good. We did a writing lesson on possessive nouns and writing a friendly letter. I hate that the lesson is so short. Why are we using the same book for 6 months? That means I have to go through it super slow. Level 2 and level 3 arent a problem. I doubt I'll finish those books. The lesson is so easy that I don't know what else to do when Im done. I don't want to give them a hundred examples on things like his, hers, your, my, etc. They understood the material.They just have a lot of free time. I feel bad about giving them so much free time, but I'm just working with what they give me to work with. I don't know how to entertain 2 12 year old boys. One of the boys had more magic stuff. He has a different magic trick almost every class.

My 3rd class was great. I had 3 students in my computer lab class. They all did their work and I didn't have to stand over them and beg. Since they were being so good I left them alone and sat down at one of the other computers and read the articles that they were reading. I also read the articles that the lowest level will be doing next week. I wrote down the questions that I'm going to use for class work. I'm going to use the same questions that are on the tests that they always rush through randomly choosing answers. I wish all my classes would be that well behaved in the computer class!!

Conversation is always the low point of the day. Today's topic was asking someone to borrow something and requesting help when something is wrong. I have 5 boys and 2 girls in the class (6th graders). 4 of the boys are always disrupting class and not paying attention. 1 boy actually pays attention. He's the new student. It just upsets me that these are some of my brightest students with good English potential but they just don't care. All of these conversation classes are a waste of my time. Its just a class to take up time. No one is actually paying attention. They would be really beneficial if the students would make the effort. I really like the conversation textbooks. I put forth my part of the effort to give them lots of examples. If they can't speak in these situations then its their own fault. Today's class was interesting. One girl just kept laughing out loud everytime we'd read an example. why? I dont know. The other girl was reading a comic book hidden under her desk. One boy was holding up his book to conceal the fact that he was playing a game on his cell phone. One of the boys had a blade and was cutting out people's heads in the textbook. Then he took his battery out of his phone. He touched the metal part of the battery with 2 pencils and made smoke come from the battery. He thought was the coolest thing. Then 2 more boys wanted to take out their batteries and do it too. Only 3 students were actually doing the practice conversations. I had to be one person's partner because of uneven numbers.Then at the end of class I'm up there talking to myself because no one is paying attention and they are even talking over me. I only have 2 more weeks of this class!!

My last class of the day was good. The boy never has his books for speaking or writing. I asked him why he never has his books. He said his writing book ran away and his speaking book died. So he lost both books. I had to make a copy. Today we did a writing lesson on stories and sentence types. They did a good job with the material.