Uijeongbu teaching-related update
As you may have guessed from my earlier post discussing a trip to the Uijeongbu immigration office I recently renewed my contract with our academy for a third year. This was a decision that I'd shared with our academy director two months ago - as stipulated in my contract - which left him looking equal parts excited and relieved. During the course of our subsequent conversation he mentioned having attended a franchise meeting the preceding weekend in which representatives from all of our 480 branches were present. During orientation we were told there was also a branch in Beijing to service the needs of Korean families living in the Chinese capital but I have no idea if they were also in attendance -- or if that franchise location is still in operation.
Naturally there were a lot of details concerning policy statements and the like, but there were also two other fun tidbits that I discovered. The first was that our English-education franchise has been included on a list of "Korean Companies to Watch: 2009". The second, and even better, piece of news was that our academy in Uijeongbu was highlighted as being one of the top 30 branches within the franchise. That was certainly a pleasant surprise. While I've tried to be careful about not mentioning the franchise's name on my blog, it is a name that's instantly-recognizable among the Koreans I've met.
Perhaps that's not such a surprise given the quality of some of our students. One of our students received extremely high marks on the TOIEC-Bridge test, another tested so high at her elementary school that she was given the chance to sit in on a university class, any time one of the local schools has an English speaking contest our academy supplies several of the winners, and I've heard that one of our students was recently admitted to an English-language elementary school. This is not to say that all of our students are geniuses though -- all the examples provided above have their counterparts within remedial classes who don't put any effort into their studies and it shows. Apathetic students aside, it's a wonderful feeling to think of how I might be playing a small part in getting and keeping students interested in learning, regardless of the subject.
My first visit to Korea came in 2002 (no, not during the World Cup), but it wasn't until August 2007 that my teaching career began. My first class on my very first day of teaching was a group of six phonics students. A little more than two years later and Friday (28 August 2009) was the last day of class for one of those students. Her family moved to Seoul over the weekend so she won't be able to attend our academy in the future. The majority of the students from my first session of classes have moved on for one reason or another but there are still a few who continue to attend our academy. It will be a strange day when no one from those initial classes remains.
I don't know how teaching schedules are organized in Korean public schools, but when I was a student in the Washington state public school system we were assigned to new teachers at the completion of each grade. If things work similarly in Korea, this means that there are a few students who have had me as their instructor longer than any of their public school teachers. Certainly an interesting thought to consider ...
(Plus, there's always the possibility that I'll be corrected in the comments to this entry!)