Kyle in Korea

Note: If you don’t like reading or only have a few minutes, there are a couple of fun videos a the bottom you could scroll for.

Most of the time, I’m at school. I realized that based on reading this blog, you might think I am traveling most of the time. So hopefully this post should give you a better idea of my day-to-day.

I work Monday through Friday, 2 pm to 10 pm at a hagwon called Avalon. A hagwon is a private, for-profit school. There are over 70,000 of these schools located all over Korea specializing in math, science, art, and especially English language. Learning English is important for young Koreans because English language skills are part of the college entrance exams and learning English is widely viewed as very important to a student’s future success.

Our school is relatively new, having just opened in December of 2009. It is also relatively big- probably the biggest in Andong, with somewhere around 250 students, I think. I have maybe 70 or 80 of those students in my various classes. My day at work is basically split into two parts. Early in the day I have younger students and after 7 pm I have older students. The school’s calender year is split up into quarters and we are just finishing the spring quarter. I come into work at 2 pm everyday except once a week we have a short meeting that requires me to be there at 1:30. I clock in with a fingerprint reader at the door and walk into the lobby. This is the front door, located on the third floor of an 8 floor building.

The first thing I see after this is the front desk:

To my left is a small lobby type area from which I have to retrieve tardy children before the start of a lot of my classes:

I turn right and walk into the staff room:

There are twelve desks in the staff room, for 6 American and 6 Korean teachers. In this picture you can see Ay-yeoung and Hyunjoo, two university students who are teachers at Avalon. They are also our friends and neighbors in our apartment building. You can’t see my desk or Ann’s desk in the picture above, but here they are:

Both Ann and I have organized our classes into plastic folders, which you can see at our desks. I think I have 9 folders, representing about 9 different classes I teach throughout the week, most of them twice a week. This quarter, my first class was not until 4 pm, so to start the day I had 2 hours of prep time before my day really got started. It’s unlikely I will be so lucky next quarter, most teachers begin their teaching day earlier than that. Prep time basically consists of checking to see what work you need to accomplish in each class and reading through the class book to identify what topics you are covering, what is going to be difficult for kids and will need extra explaining, what the answers are to questions in the book, and making sure you have enough material and activities to easily fill the time allotted for the class. Extra activities might be a practice worksheet, a game, a short lecture, or whatever I feel like will help the students understand the material.

There are different levels for students at Avalon based mostly on skill level but maybe a little on age as well. There are well over a dozen different levels, many with multiple sections of students taught by different teachers. Each class gets some of its time with a Korean teacher, taught mostly in Korean, and some of its time with an English teacher. Class sizes are typically around 8-10 students, but can be smaller or bigger.I have some classes that I really like and some classes I don’t like as much. Behavior, maturity, and eagerness to learn vary widely among the students. Some are very excited to learn English, while some students are only in the classroom because their parents force them to come. Also, you should keep in mind that many of these students spend 10-12 hours in the classroom every day, followed by a considerable amount of homework, so school is also their primary place for socialization and entertainment.

Each English teacher has their own classroom, where they teach most of their classes. Each room has a caricature of the teacher on the door, a big whiteboard, and desks and chairs. Min is room 206, and here is what the door looks like:

The astute reader will notice from the light brown hair and fine features that my caricature does not look much like me. It is actually a friend of Ann’s named Justin, who attended a wedding we also went to shortly before we left. Since the pictures from the wedding showed us dressed up nicely and were recent, we sent them to the school before we arrived and anyways, at some point, Justin was mistaken for me.

If you aren’t yet bored of hearing about my school, here’s a video I took last week of some students from one of my Wednesday classes. This Wednesday class is focused on review and to help the students review, we played a game called Stop the Bus. The idea of the game is for students, in teams, to come up with an English word in each of four categories that begins with a specific letter that I choose. Popular categories include animals, food, and places, but always I include a couple that are class specific. This particular class has 4 books, Reading, Writing, Listening, and TOPS (Speaking). This makes review fun because I have a lot of material to choose from. When the team gets the answer to each of the categories, they are supposed to yell “Stop the Bus!”, and then write the answers on the board. Since I’m not very involved in the game once it gets rolling, I was free to record a couple games, which I normally can’t do in my regular classes, since I have enough trouble already with the kids getting distracted, and since watching the kids fill out the books and checking their work isn’t that exciting.

And here’s part of another game of Stop the Bus…