Teaching in Korea - Stage 1: How do you teach?

Given that Sarah and I have never taught before, we both were anxious about what it would be like, especially in a foreign country. When we arrived at the private school (or hagwon, as they are called here) on our first day, we were jet-lagged and running off of pure adrenaline. The school is huge, spanning two large four story building which encompasses three different programs. Their regular program introduces kids to English with interactive rooms. These rooms are themed, from an airport security room, to a stage hospital, to a full on news broadcasting room with lights and cameras (there are about 20-30 separate rooms altogether). Kids comes from their Korean public school on a sort of "field trip" to visit this program for a couple days at a time, so there is always a news group of students coming through.

Front entrance and courtyard

In contrast, Sarah and I are teaching a classroom of kids who are at the school year round learning English. Sarah teaches Grades 4 & 5 and I teach Grades 2 & 3, each of us with a co-teacher to swap halfway through the day. We get each group of kids (12-15 of them per grade) for about 1.5 hours plus a homeroom class for kids to catch up on homework and play. In total, it's about 3.5 hours of teaching per day. These kids attend Korean school before coming to their English school, and often even have other tutoring sessions or music classes they go to. There are set textbooks we use for material which the kids are tested on, but for the most part we are trying to make learning English enjoyable rather than stuff their brains with excessive information. We have about 3.5-4 hours of time during working hours to mark assignments/tests, prep for lessons, report student progress with the Korean staff, and various other administrative things required for our jobs.

Funny poster in the restroom

Getting a feel of how fluent our students are at English was one of our main goals when starting to teach full-time, and we've been really impressed with their abilities and work ethic so far. Gaining control over the classroom hasn't been as big of an issue as I expected, although we have pinpointed the students who are most disruptive and have mitigated the disturbances in class with varying levels of success. I think it'll be something we continue to work on getting comfortable with, as it feels quite odd standing in front of a group of Korean girls & boys and speaking English to them. Since they are so bright for their age, we have already developed overly high expectations of their quality of work and behaviour when in class. Reflecting on the day afterwards, I constantly have to remind myself that they are still young kids - even though I was a goody-two-shoe-know-it-all in elementary school there is no way I'd have kept up with these kids. It has been a busy, yet fulfilling start to our teaching "careers"; a long way to go before we get totally comfortable, but we are on our way.