We’re a new team, her and I, and I was anxious about how well we’d work together. We do fifth grade, nine classes, at the end of every week. She’s new to the school, she’s young, and I didn’t have high expectations because when we planned out our lesson together she seemed to follow pretty close to the lesson plan recommended in the book-- which tends to be a bit dry and suggests games for students that are unrealistic because either the students’ level isn’t high enough or because they are not well behaved enough to handle the relaxed classroom atmosphere the game requires. Plus, her previous position as a teacher in Nowon probably meant that she taught higher level students who were probably relatively well behaved.
Side note: In order to understand the different levels of students one may encounter in the Seoul school system you must have the following background information: Most of the higher education level/higher economic level students that go to our Elementary School move to Nowon in middle school to get a better public school education because there is more money flowing into the school system there. This phenomenon happens all over the city even though the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education requires teachers and administration to rotate randomly to a new school every five years to help keep education levels equal. The discrepancies in quality of education probably happen because of the different levels of income. Higher income areas send their kids to expensive after school academies, have higher parent involvement in school activities and I suppose have more money in their budgets for classroom equipment. When you ask someone in Seoul where the ‘bad’ areas of the city are, they will tell you areas in which the education is poorer because, let’s face it, there is really no unsafe areas in this city.)
Needless to say, I felt that my new co-teacher had had the life up in Nowon and was dreadfully unprepared for the roughness of our student population. But The Powers That Be must have felt I deserved a break because she blew me away.
She had behavioral chants for them to say when they began to act up. She had them bow hello and goodbye. She had them make nametags with their English names on them and display them on their desks. In short, she was MegaTeacher.
Fifth grade went by swimmingly, and I felt myself beginning to enjoy getting to know them.
Here are some more random happenings:
1.The third graders absolutely hated the names Rose and Sam. Sam means “fountain” in Korean. I’m not sure why they didn’t like Rose, but one girl begged me to change her name. She even took the time to think through an English plea: “Please teacher, I don’t like this name.” When I took up the nametag, she put it in my hand and said “I don’t like this!” It was like I was calling her Crap or Butthead.
2.When I asked the fifth graders to name any states they knew, I got the following responses: Guam, L.A., Miami, Mexico, London
3.My Co-teacher kept telling the kids that San Fransisco was a state.
4.I took my first Korean class yesterday. It was taught completely in Korean by a rather attractive Korean man. He had a doll made up of two pandas connected by a string. When you pulled them apart, they made cute noises and a little song played. He used this doll to demonstrate something or other. The funny part is, he thought the panda dolls were the cutest/funniest/most entertaining thing. He kept pulling them apart and laughing even though to us (a class full of westerners…Germans, French, Egyptian, American, etc.) it was only slightly funny the first time. The entertaining effect the Korean teacher was going for worked, however, because we thought his fascination with the pandas was funny.
5.Andrew Dillon broke his wrist snow boarding a couple of weeks ago. Since then, he has decided to continue working out one side of his body.
(Andrew Dillon making the "L" for loser sign. He claims he was scratching his eyebrow in contemplation.)
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