School
So I had my first day of classes today and it went really well. I have 2 main groups I'm teaching right now. A group of 3rd year students before lunch and a group of 1st year students after lunch. I'm also going to be teaching a couple of classes a week for older kids but I didn't have those today. Right now my schedule is kind of weird but it'll only be that way for about 4 weeks. Regular school is on vacation right now so there's a special summer session in effect at the school in addition to regular classes. I'm co-teaching 2 of the 5 summer classes so I start work at 9:30am and teach until 1:30pm including a lunch break. On Monday and Friday, I have two evening classes between 6 and 7:30 and on Wednesday, I have one class at 6pm. Once the summer session is over (end of August), I'll be on a more normal schedule. My first class will be either just before or just after the kindergarten lunch period (11:40-12:20) and I'll be done after the same evening classes I have now.
With my third year class, I'm teaching three 35 minute periods back to back from 9:55am to 11:40am. Every day one of the periods is reading comprehension. I have a science class with them every Thursday and a social studies class once a week (Monday, I think). Science was interesting to teach but fortunately it was very basic stuff. The other classes I'll teach them are writing, a topic discussion class and a class using a kids newspaper.
After lunch, I teach 2 periods (35 min. each) of reading comprehension to the first year students. Their reading exercises consist of 8-15 sentence stories with comprehension questions. Their English (and general reading) level is pretty low so I pretty much had to do everything out loud with the entire class. They don't understand directions very well which meant it took a little trial and error to figure out the best way to get them to understand the material. I finally got them to use their finger to follow along in the book while they repeated the words/sentences after me. Then once we had read through the passage together I had each student (there are only 6 in the class) read a passage individually while the rest of the students followed along. It was about the only way I could think of to know if all the students were being able to actually read the passages and it seemed to work well. The comprehension questions were quite a challenge though. A lot of the questions pertained to deciding whether a statement was true or false in regards to what they had just read. Doesn't sound too hard...except the concept of true and false was very difficult to explain and I'm not sure they completely grasped it. Sometimes it seemed like they got it and other times it seemed to go completely over their heads.
I won't see the kids again until Monday so it should be intersting to see how much they've retained over the weekend. We were supposed to have classes tomorrow but school is cancelled because the building the school is in has no power. Apparently some part of the electrical system blew shortly after I went home and it won't be fixed until sometime over the weekend.
Whee...three more days stuck in my hotel room. Well, I probably won't just sit here all weekend now that everyone is back from vacation which means there'll be more to do. I'm supposed to be moving into an apartment that another teacher is moving out of because he teaches at another one of the GATE campuses but Jackie is having trouble finding him an apartment near where he teaches so I'm stuck in the hotel until he moves out. Its fun. I'm getting kind of sick of eating packaged, instant or restaurant food. The food at the school is good (and free) but when I'm not teaching I'm on my own and that's hard without any way to cook. Fortunately Korean food is cheap. I don't think I've paid more than about $5 for a meal and I try not to eat "out" more than once per day.
With my third year class, I'm teaching three 35 minute periods back to back from 9:55am to 11:40am. Every day one of the periods is reading comprehension. I have a science class with them every Thursday and a social studies class once a week (Monday, I think). Science was interesting to teach but fortunately it was very basic stuff. The other classes I'll teach them are writing, a topic discussion class and a class using a kids newspaper.
After lunch, I teach 2 periods (35 min. each) of reading comprehension to the first year students. Their reading exercises consist of 8-15 sentence stories with comprehension questions. Their English (and general reading) level is pretty low so I pretty much had to do everything out loud with the entire class. They don't understand directions very well which meant it took a little trial and error to figure out the best way to get them to understand the material. I finally got them to use their finger to follow along in the book while they repeated the words/sentences after me. Then once we had read through the passage together I had each student (there are only 6 in the class) read a passage individually while the rest of the students followed along. It was about the only way I could think of to know if all the students were being able to actually read the passages and it seemed to work well. The comprehension questions were quite a challenge though. A lot of the questions pertained to deciding whether a statement was true or false in regards to what they had just read. Doesn't sound too hard...except the concept of true and false was very difficult to explain and I'm not sure they completely grasped it. Sometimes it seemed like they got it and other times it seemed to go completely over their heads.
I won't see the kids again until Monday so it should be intersting to see how much they've retained over the weekend. We were supposed to have classes tomorrow but school is cancelled because the building the school is in has no power. Apparently some part of the electrical system blew shortly after I went home and it won't be fixed until sometime over the weekend.
Whee...three more days stuck in my hotel room. Well, I probably won't just sit here all weekend now that everyone is back from vacation which means there'll be more to do. I'm supposed to be moving into an apartment that another teacher is moving out of because he teaches at another one of the GATE campuses but Jackie is having trouble finding him an apartment near where he teaches so I'm stuck in the hotel until he moves out. Its fun. I'm getting kind of sick of eating packaged, instant or restaurant food. The food at the school is good (and free) but when I'm not teaching I'm on my own and that's hard without any way to cook. Fortunately Korean food is cheap. I don't think I've paid more than about $5 for a meal and I try not to eat "out" more than once per day.