Monday evening, while teaching my final class of the day, I asked my students what they did over their weekend. One girl mentioned going to the movies. The sole boy in class spoke about wanting to play baseball but staying inside because it was raining too much to meet his friends outdoors. The other girl said she had a horrible time and went on ( Read more... )

There has been a lot of talk here recently about the match between Argentina and Korea. During dinner last night some of my coworkers asked me who I thought would win and my guess was that the game would end in a draw, which seemed to surprise everyone. The following class period saw one of my students - a boy in his first year of middle school ( Read more... )

Today was April Fool's Day (만우절 in Korean, or 萬愚節 if you prefer the Chinese characters) and mine passed by rather quietly. In years past I've tried to trick my students by telling them that they'll have to take their big level test, though with the way our academy's schedule turned out today really was when everyone had to take their level tests ( Read more... )

It looks like I not only teach my students English, but can also (in one case!) help them with their Korean grammar ( Read more... )

Earlier in the week I was teaching an intermediate class of two fifth grade girls and covering the grammatical structure "know how to + [verb]". We went over the examples in the book, I asked them questions, and encouraged them to ask me questions as well. One of my questions was, "Do you know how to swim?". The first girl responded with "Yes, I ( Read more... )

Some time near the beginning of autumn we had one of our teachers take a day off due to the death of her grandfather. This came on short notice - perhaps unsurprisingly - and resulted in everyone scrambling to work out a schedule on how best to cover her classes. I mean ... it's not like you actually want something like that to happen, and ( Read more... )

While teaching passive voice in one of my classes this week we did an activity from the student book that has students ask and respond to questions about where their belongings are from/ were made. Students are typically quick to check their pencils, highlighters, pencil cases, and notebooks; with a little prompting they also start looking at the ( Read more... )

Today (well, Thursday) was the last day of work this week before the onset of the Chuseok holiday. The timing of Chuseok is set by the lunar calender - the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month - and as such it's precise date changes from year to year. This year it falls on 3 October, with the days before (Friday) and after (Sunday) marked as ( Read more... )

Back at the start of August our academy held a teachers' meeting - an event that usually only takes place two or three times as year - to discuss affairs prior to the start of the new academic year. One of the topics brought up during the meeting was H1N1 - 신종 인플루엔자 in Korean - and we were notified that eight students at the elementary school ( Read more... )

A recent article from MSNBC came out over the weekend discussing the drop in familiarity with cursive handwriting and its future alongside courses focusing more heavily on computer-related skills. The article mentions that the American National Assessment of Educational Progress will soon have students fill in composition components via computer ( Read more... )