Yep it's the holidays! But no I don't get them. I am destined to work for the next month. I have a week of afternoon classes teaching every grade daily, then two weeks of some sort of English winter camp and then another week just like the first.
Just a note on the winter camp, I have absolutely no idea what it will entail, teaching English of course, but I have been given no information regarding what exactly I'll be teaching, what ages or even if I need to prepare anything, bah. Well I suppose one up side is that the school the winter camp is being held at is literally (and yes I do mean literally, not figuratively as most people fuck up now-a-days) two minutes from my place on foot. Also meeting some new kids could be cool, hopefully they'll be just as awesome as the ones I have now.
So anyway, I started the afternoon classes yesterday and I had actually prepared my lessons correctly and had my resources set out like I wanted them. I was dreading the first class: grades 1&2 combined, the last time I took them it was utter chaos, 24 kids that speak basically no English. But that was not the case this time. I guess being on holiday deterred a fair amount of the kids because I was left with a class much closer to about 8. This was a perfect number and my lesson worked out really well. The kids reacted to the games we played and they understood well enough to participate. A few times one of the very few teachers in the school at the mo wandered past and stuck their heads in, at which point the kids all shut up. Useful sometimes, but not as much when in full swing of a rowdy game.
So basically the first lesson went down really well and I was pumped for the second lesson, because next I had grades 3-4 which meant they may actually understand some of what I say. However only two turned up, which effectively put my lesson plan in the toilet. Try as though I might my lesson fell apart after the first 20 minutes and in the second half the two girls I was teaching decided they would teach ME Korean. Fairly useful I suppose, but when they got bored of my inability they moved onto music videos. Now this wouldn't be so bad in a room full of students, but the girls picked all these music videos which SHOULD be aimed at adults. As a westerner, or maybe just a male adult in the room I brought it to an end quite quickly as I felt uncomfortable.
Finally I had my last lesson of the day, this being grades 5-6. Now enough students did turn up to this one, not nearly as many as I would have liked, but enough for my lesson to hang together. However they ran through my games like they were nothing and I quickly realised that I had set the level of the lesson too low. It was a little late by the time I realised. So I was left scraping together what I could. I used up some of my resources for other lessons, but as I am such a new teacher I really lacked the stock I required, so in the end I was forced to fold and allow the kids to play UNO, although it turns out that it was actually only the last 10 mins where I had failed to produce anything.
Although clearly I had failed to adequately plan for the lesson I felt that they did not go all that bad. For one the first lesson went down well, secondly I learnt some Korean and finally my lessons did not descend into chaos immediately.
Well that was yesterday and today I have just finished my lesson planning and will be trying it out in about half an hour, so I'll report back either later today or tomorrow, just depending on how knackered I am later.
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