My second day teaching

It was quite a good day today. Before my classes started, I was really nervous, and I was determined to win any power struggles with the students in my 5pm class. I had a very productive chat in the morning about that class with Barbara, one of the senior-ranking teachers in my school, and she taught me the technique of the "evil eye," the act of staring at a student until the class goes quiet and someone bumps the student's arm-and then she knows! I had to do this quite a few times, but I ended up winning the day, I think. Certainly the class was far more productive today than it was yesterday. I must admit that the spacial dynamics of the class are terrible: there is one desk too few, and 14 students are crowded into a room that is perhaps a quarter of the size of a normal western classroom.

My 3pm class, on the other hand, is much smaller (about 7 students), and all of them are real sweeties. It's probably the closest thing one could have to the class from heaven. They're really cute, too, although I must admit that I think all my kids are cute. I taught the Tuesday Thursday Middle School Class for the first time today. This bunch was even quieter than the last bunch. In fact, I would almost call the class rude, because almost nobody responded to my repeated greetings to them! Next time they're going to get their greetings one by one, until they answer! But they did work very diligently and fairly quietly. That, coming on the heels of my 5pm class, is, however, a relief. But I made them talk. I would "ask" the students if they wanted to read the line of text in question, and if they said no, I made a judgment call as to their motivation. In most cases I made them read it anyway, and they did pretty well. When they all began a conversation exercise with their partners for the first time, after much prodding by yours truly, the cliche about the stones speaking immediately went through my mind!

Several other things I accomplished today included: following my lesson plans in all my classes, discovering in less than 20 seconds the difference between "some" and "any" (it's one of those things one doesn't normally think about), and sorting out the unnamed notebooks from my 3pm class, and making sure that everyone else's was labeled.

Tomorrow I will show up to school very early, finish marking the MWF Middle School class's notebooks, tidy up my plans for the day, and plan for the coming week. We're required to plan a week ahead.

So I feel much better today, and I genuinely enjoyed teaching, despite some nervousness and some awkwardness at times. A real thank you to everyone for their encouragement, including Alexandra, Missy, and Ben! And a thank you to Ian for his email! Ian, of course, lives in Seoul over here, and is a good friend. But since I don't have a phone, he emailed me today. It goes without saying that the pleasure of his company is a real treat, and something I'm very thankful for.

Good night!

My first day teaching

Whew, and what a day it was! Although I had worked hard in preparing, I didn't feel prepared, and I was consequently nervous the whole day. For a few seconds I had thoughts of quitting, while for most of the day I felt like I was a miserable failure. Now, after a little reflection, I'm happy I survived--which in fact, I did!

My four classes began at 3pm, and continued until 7:35pm, my MWF schedule. TR I go until 8:15pm in another class.

First things first, when I walked into my classes, a few of the children shrieked and laughed--with smiles on their faces! I found that quite unnerving. Is it the height or the moustache? Anyway, the kids soon learned I'm a nice guy. The elementary kids can make a lot of noise if they are happy. Unfortunately, one class was much too happy! Tomorrow I'm going to ask one or two of the more experienced teachers for their advice on exactly how to "get on them" (see previous post for that phrase). On the other hand, when it comes to speaking, they speak quite softly, and my hearing loss doesn't help anything. I really don't want to be limited by my loss, so I tried very carefully to listen for mistakes and mispronounced letters--which were many. Sometimes I corrected in an informal fashion, while a few times I worked one on one with a particular student.

I got off to an odd start: the textbook for the 3pm class was teaching the children how to trace letters, when they had been used to writing my school's trademark every day:

Today is Wednesday September 1st, 2004.
Yesterday was Tuesday August 31st, 2004.
Tomorrow will be Thursday September 2nd, 2004.
I feel happy [or "sad," or "ok" etc., as the case may be]

Then I had a mini-panic flutter inside when I forgot how to spell "February." I wasn't sure about the first "r," believe it or not. I had the kids spell it out for me (as with everything else), and fortunately they got it right. But I chickened out for the last two classes and ignored the dates.

I forgot in one class to tell the kids to put their names in their new notebooks, and so I have several notebooks without names from that class. This is one of the most basic mistakes in the book for a new teacher, and I made it. I didn't make that mistake again in the next classes, however! Even so, after announcing that I wanted the students' names, and my name, in their notebooks and workbooks, and after spot-checking a bunch, a few notebooks were still unsigned. I guess one simply must make sure to see the names in each and every workbook and notebook on the first day. Anyway, I must sort that out tomorrow, which I'm not looking forward to doing.

The 10 minutes between classes is minimal, and so the day was an absolute whirlwind from one class to another. I must change classrooms for each class. The classes went by very quickly, except for the last five minutes in two or three, when I ran out of curriculum, and had to use my "time fillers" to pass the time.

One class was much too rowdy, and I'll be splitting up four students tomorrow--characteristically, I didn't think of that during the class period. My middle school class, which was next, was, fortunately, more quiet. Getting them to talk in English was like pulling teeth! Everybody warned me about this before, however, so I guess I don't have to feel like a complete failure. We actually accomplished more or less what I set out to do in that class, but the students grumbled a bit. There have got to be more exciting ways of teaching the material. Still, all in all, I liked the middle school class the most. The seemed like a decent bunch, and I'm looking forward to trying to find their passions and connecting those to English conversation and writing.

My other two classes were decent, although I didn't think the material was engaging the students. Somehow I as the teacher have to engage them in the material. Tomorrow I'm looking forward to talking with Barbara about these things, since she kindly consented. Barbara is a very nice lady here who has a lot of teaching experience in the school, something like 10 years.

Well, what have I learned, apart from any help, from my first day?

First, I need to visualize myself leading the children in the activities. Second, I need to know my mind ahead of time when certain frequently recurring situations occur. For me, the paradox of the first day, after reviewing the students' notebooks, was that the textbooks seemed far below the level of the students, but the students still had trouble grasping the textbooks' concepts and putting them into practice consisently(e.g. present tense of the verb "to be"). I think the middle school students got more out of the paradigm I put up for that verb than anything assignments from the book. And that's typical, too, because learning here is based on rote memorization, not intuition or exploration.

As for my beloved bell, a magnificent traditional Korean bell which I bought today in the Kyobo bookstore, the students were scared of it! It lets forth a loud and moderately deep gong, which apparently was too loud. Tomorrow, I think I'll try having it rung much more softly--by a student, so they have a nice piece of routine to work with. On the other hand, maybe I should just ditch the idea. I'll see how it goes.

Well, it's 11:18pm, and tomorrow comes quickly. I'll be getting up early to prepare for my classes, and 3pm will come early enough! I'm also looking forward to having lunch with Ian, and we can chat about the first days of our new terms (he's taught a full term already.)

...THE AFTERMATH...
It was dark outside when I left LTRC (my school), after marking most of the notebooks. I'll mark the rest tomorrow. On the subway I had the good fortune to ride a few stops with a particularly helpful staff member of the school who, in the most gentle of ways, kicked us out at closing time, 8:30pm. I asked him what time he starts in the mornings, and he told me that he starts at 9am! Now that's a long day!

And, my thanks to: (ladies first today): Alexandra, Jennifer, Sylvia, and Auntie Kathy, and also to Ben, Hyoung Joon, and Jeff (my nice landlord) for their emails!

My address

Some of you have asked about my address. It is my employer's address that will follow (all the mail at my physical address just gets forwarded there anyway). Please include all the elements: my employer, the Language Teaching Research Center, rents only a part of the building.

Nathan Bauman
Language Teaching Resource Center
60-17, 1-Ka, Taepyung-Ro
Chung-Ku, Seoul
100-101
South Korea

That last post...

Sorry about that, but here's a lesson for you: I've learned the hard way to email my work to myself while composing in the blogger compose pane; if one takes too long, all work will be lost after hitting the "submit" button." Unfortunately, the email margins are sometimes scrambled. I'm too tired to clean it up now, but I'll try to fix it once I get my internet connection.

Tomorrow is the first day of classes!

Well, the title says it all. I've read the "level files," the guides to
teaching particular levels of English proficiency that my school has created.
I've read my teacher training manual, the main teacher training manual, and
the relevant sections of the textbooks' Teachers' Guides; this sounds like a
lot, but there's quite a bit of overlap between all of these. Additionally,
we had three teachers, and the director of the English department, talk to us
about teaching.

What types of little pointers have I learned? All sorts of things, everything
from "how to make books last longer" to how to plan a lesson. When teaching a
lesson from the textbook, I must remember what the textbook is trying to do!
When there is misbehavior in the class, I must stop the whole class and deal
with it. Pair work works well for students, because it increases their
involvement with the language, since they can talk to each other and not only
to the teacher all the time. Use of multiple intelligences, such as sight,
hearing, etc. aids learning. Breaking up the lesson into smaller chunks helps
prevent boredom (and every teacher knows that boredom is the number one
enemy!). Elementary dialogue can be read from the textbooks, practiced, and
then used as the basis for more dialogue about the students. Most students
will write beautifully if their messy work is erased, and they are told to
write again. When taking attendence, I can ask basic questions of each
student, such as "how are you?" "what did you eat for breakfast?" and "where
is my pen?" to allow the student extra interaction time with the
language. "Skywriting" can be a useful aid to writing, as is a comparison of
the lines on their notebook pages to the boxes used to write the Korean
script, Hangul (pronounced, "han-gool"). Team games where the goal is to win
can be a great source of motivation! I don't claim to have exhausted my list,
but I have exhaused my memory this evening in this smoke-filled internet
cafe. But, obviously, these things will be worked on as I improve under the
watchful eyes of the supervisors who will come in now and then to observe my
teaching.

I'll be teaching five classes, four a day (there's a MWF vs. TR split in the
time-table), using three textbooks and their associated teacher's books,
workbooks, flashcards, and cassette tapes. The youngest kids won't know how
to write yet, while the oldest are the dreaded middle-schoolers, overworked
kids whose bodies are changing so rapidly that they've become shy and
withdrawn, not to mention tired. Your average Korean middle school kid goes
to school for a full day, plus at least two private classes (in
English, Music, Science, etc.) per day. The amount of homework the
children receive must be overwhelming. I'm not dreading the Middle Schoolers,
though. In this connection I should mention an anecdote I heard about a
schoolgirl who was asked if she was allowed up past midnight. She laughed,
and said, "I'm not allowed to go to bed before midnight!"

I'm not as nervous as I could be, thanks to the training program, but I'm just
a bit unsettled, since I don't really know what to expect. Still, I'm looking
forward to finally getting started! I'm hoping that I can make things
interesting enough for the kids, but I've got my plans all ready for any
misbehavior! As cousin Jen, a Montessori teacher, says, "you just get on them
and get on them and keep getting on them!" :-) I'm promising myself one
thing: I won't yell, and I'll try to raise my voice only when absolutely
necessary. I saw a teacher not long ago who yelled and growled at her kids,
who were as young as they come, and one nearly cried. One thing I'm looking
for to help get the kids' attention when I need it is a xylophone block, or a
gong. But I've had absolutely no luck finding one; everybody seems to think
that this sort of thing is in one of the two very local mega-bookstores, but
it just isn't. I may have to settle for a merchant's call bell, which isn't
nearly as romantic (a gong hearkens to the scholastic experiences of both
Buddhism and Christianity).

Well, I'm tired, and I'm going to be heading along, now. Tomorrow will be,
possibly, the most proverbial "big day" of my stay in Seouth Korea, so I'd
better start getting ready for it. If I write anymore I shall be passing into
that terrible style known as "stream of consciousness"--if I haven't already.

Still coming up: pictorial updates & my apartment (once I get wired to the
internet), as well as "konglish," cultural economic imperialism in advertising
and much, much more!

...And, my thanks to Alexandra, Brian, and Ben for their emails!

Little Adventures: Opening a bank account

Only a few hours ago I discovered that my training file was correct when it said one didn't need a legal alien residence card to open a bank account. Some books I had read previously said the opposite. So, my plane ticket money reimbursement in hand, I walked down to the bank and opened an account. My school had provided a paper that said, in Korean, "I would like to open a bank account and have a debit card." I was required to show my passport, which the very nice and somewhat bilingual teller made a photocopy of. I had to give my mailing address, and that was about it. I received a bank book; a colleague (that sounds so nice, "colleague") told me that I will need the bank book when I visit the branch to transfer money to my home account. It wasn't much of an adventure, really, but it feels good to have a bank account.

Bongeun-sa Buddhist Temple

Yesterday Ian and I went to the COEX underground mall; it's huge, although the ceiling is not very high. There was a wonderful bookstore there, and a CD store whose classical section came close to rivalling the HMV on Yonge St. in Toronto. I even found and purchased a hard-to-get opera by Faure. The English language religion section of the bookstore was loaded with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Marcus Borg (the only respectable member of the "Jesus Seminar"). I even found my favorite Buddhist writer, Thich Nhat Hanh.

About a ten minute walk from the West Gate of the mall there is a magnificent Buddhist temple that has been in continuous use since AD 794. Ian and I arrived around 8:30pm at night, when the sun was almost gone. The Bongeun-sa temple is absolultely marvelous, and is associated with the Zen school of Buddhism. Huge portraits of fierce-looking warrior-daemons guard the inner entrance to the garden grounds, while the outer gates feature lions and elephants. There is an altar with candles in what might be described as the outer courtyard. People were bowing deeply with folded hands to the warrior-portraits, and to the altar, so I did too. There are several buildings which comprise this temple, rising up steps on a hill-side slope. We didn't go in any of these building-rooms, which featured beautiful Buddha statues, and prayer mats, but we did pass under an open area lit with a thousand paper lanterns, each representing a person's wish. I wanted to light one and put my wish on it, but I didn't know where to get the lanterns from. These lanterns formed a ceiling of light which produced in me a warm and positive feeling! But the massive white statue of the Buddha himself was what touched me the most. His right arm raised in blessing, a transcendant smile upon his lips, the giant Buddha stands in his alcove and looks out upon the city in front of him, and upon his devotees down below. A polished stone surface in front of the statue glimmers in the night light, and on it, bowing, kneeling, meditating, were the devotees of the Buddha, reminding me of Amitabha's lotus pond, which I shall now describe for those who don't know, using both my own words and those of Joseph Campbell.

When he was about to obtain illumination and nirvana, the Amitabha Buddha vowed that he would not accept nirvana for himself unless he could bring each person to the same state. Forewith he was seated in front of a pond surrounded by trees and birds. And any person who paid devotion in his life to Amitabha would be reborn as a lotus flower upon the pond. If he was far from illumination, he would be reborn as a closed flower, a bud. But the radiant gaze of Amitabha, and the song of the birds and the trees: "all is impermanent, all is without a soul, all is impermanent, all is without a soul" would slowly open his flower, until at last he could behold the full glory of the Buddha, while seated in eternal bliss upon Amitabha's lotus pond.

"All life is sorrowful," taught the Buddha, wisely. But having attained enlightenment, living transendantly and immanently, the Buddha-statue, eye-lids seemingly closed, welcomes those with a slight smile who have yet to attain the blissful state.*


*Note about Buddhist iconography: the Buddha is always drawn with a third eye, shaped like a jewel, in the center of his forehead. In one statue I know of in Japan, there is a fourth mark near the top of his head, indicating the highest of the traditional centers of consciousness first described in an ancient Hindu text. On our statue here in Seoul, that area was taken up by a magnificent four-sided headress which protruded some distance from the statue. At the base of the statue were a series of panels depicting warriors and other figures I did not recognize. There were more candles off to the right of the statue, from the worshipers' perspective. I wonder how long candles have been in use in Buddhism.

...And, my thanks to Alexandra, Missy, & Thomas for their emails!