Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Just some random scribblings before departing for Miryang after another weekend in Changwon . . .
Much to my surprise, after actually consuming most of the International Pub's new supply of Smirnoff Mule (a vodka, ginger ale and lime combination which is refreshing and tasty, and actually leads to less consumption of alcohol), and finishing with a bizarre encounter with a young Korean woman who insisted on not only draining my large vodka and tonic but also the large red wine I had just bought for the landlady, I went back to the motel, had a shower, hit the sack and slept quite well until about 9:00 a.m. Now it's just after ten and before packing to begin the journey back to Miryang, I thought it was time for another blog.
The new job at the public elementary school has not exactly been going as well or as smoothly as I had hoped. While it is true that there remain communication difficulties and just a plain old vacuum of information so typical of this part of the world, there is one thing which may turn out to be a show-stopper in the end: when a new foreigner comes to work in a South Korean public school, they are supposed to have a four-day "orientation session" to ensure that they are more familiar with both the cultural milieu and the tasks they are expected to perform at their new school for their new employer. Alas, this is where so many of us are coming unstuck, and Korean work colleagues fail utterly to understand what a Big Deal it is missing it, simply because of the amount of important information we lose by not attending.
Now here's the crunch: according to one paragraph of my contract, EPIK are required to provide me with an orientation session before transitioning to the new post, and there appears to be no ambiguity in the terms used; the text actually says "shall" in this context, implying that this is a condition, and from which I impute that failure to provide orientation is actually a breach of contract. We will have to wait and see just how this pans out.
Anyway, another contractual condition is that most of my long summer and winter vacations (which I would actually prefer to be completely free, especially after five and a half years slogging away in a hagwon) will be occupied in "summer school" and "winter school". Apart from a desire to see friends back here in Changwon (and yet again there is a dastardly plot to lure me back to a next job perhaps in a public school here), what brought me here this weekend was the need for practical (and almost entirely job-related) shopping; firstly at the Kidari English Bookstore, where I picked up several books related to teaching technique and others which I thought would be useful for source materials, and secondly to the Alpha Mart, where I was able to get hold of other things like split pins and eyelets (for putting hands on clocks) and a couple of cheap glove puppets – a lion and a monkey, if you must know – plus a cheap clock for practicing time and surprise, surprise, met yet again a couple of my old girl students from the hagwon.
The good thing about the books – including Jeremy Harmer's "How to Teach English" [1], which came with a double-sided (PAL and NTSC) video DVD, and Ong and Murugesan's "Teaching English to Young Learners" [2], which came with an audio CD – is that digital media are more easy to manipulate in the emerging digital environment. The bad news was twofold: firstly, although some books come with disks, many still do not – too many publishers are insisting on sticking with tapes even though tapes are supposed to be on the way out. Secondly, ripping the DVD and CD to my laptop's hard drive proved to be difficult, although I could do the audio using RealPlayer under XP (ptui!), and the DVD could be viewed using Kplayer under Mandriva Linux (my preferred computing environment). Bizarrely, however, the DVD could not be played using Windoze Media Player.
It has to be said that good books about teaching the younger students seem to be few and far between; most seem to be written almost entirely with adult EFL/ESL learners in mind. Stuck in the middle of my third teaching course for some time now, the realisation had long since struck me that children have also rarely figured prominently in courses, even though most teaching jobs in a place like Korea will be either at a public elementary, middle or high school or at a hagwon. Similarly, it had struck me again and again recently that since teaching younger children involves keeping their affective threshold as low as possible, you want a hard core of five or six or so activities or games that you can just say the name of and the children know what's about to happen and what they have to do, in much the same way that they would with each section of the textbook; I'm sure lessons would be much less disjointed as a result.
With this kind of idea in mind, I found several books, mainly written in Korean (and which I therefore actually did not buy) but with lots of "classroom English" which clarified them, at the bookstore and bought them. One was "101 Games & Activities for Primary English" by Procter and Procter [3]; another was Carter and Amy's "Alphabet Starters" [4] which is highly graphical and entirely monochrome – perfect for copying – and has lots of songs, colouring exercises and some built-in dice games, all grist for the mill especially of the first/second grader classes, as I will have them for four consecutive hours each day for a week! But this is probably where more kinaesthetic work will come to the fore, whereas the older kids need more "conversation".
Alas, Carter and Amy only comes with tapes, although the other book, "Magic Chodong Youngeo Phonics" [5], actually states that the corresponding tracks on the tapes can be downloaded from a web site [6], so I shall be rather busy putting all of this together over the next couple of weeks. What emerges, however, is an additional need for a scanner (to render the pictures from the books) and a printer which can do A3 sheets (for laminated, reusable dice games and the like). The cost of those two alone will be equivalent to about US$500.00 – 600.00, but there y'go; I suppose it's a sign of how one dedicates oneself to both the place and the job that you develop enough confidence to invest in things like these.
Anyway, with these things firmly in mind (if still rather nebulous therein right now), it's time to post this latest blog and pack and depart for sunny Miryang.
See you shortly,
Andrew. 🙂
[1] Harmer, Jeremy: "How to Teach English". Pearson Longman, Harlow, Essex, England. Second Edition, 2007. ISBN 978-1-405-85309-5.
[2] Ong, Marcia Fisk and Murugesan, Vinodini: "Teaching English to Young Learners: An Illustrated Guide for EFL Teacher Development". Compass Publishing, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59966-096-7.
[3] Procter, Melanie and Procter, Stanton: "101 Games and Activities for Primary English". Moonjinmedia, 2009 (10th impression). ISBN 978-89-7260-340-5.
[4] Carmen, W. and Amy, L.: "Alphabet Starters". CENGAGE Learning, Singapore, 1999. ISBN 978-0-534-83635-1.
[5] Moon, Ho-jun, and Hwang, Ui-gwon: "Magic Chodong Youngeo Phonics". Joh Eun-geul. Third impression, 2006. ISBN 89-5911-029-9.
[6] http://www.bookcamp.co.kr/
Tags: elementary, English, hagwon, Korea, public school, South Korea, teaching
One Response to “Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon”
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Tanna Bonnet Says:
June 21st, 2016 at 11:11 amYou have a very nice blog, i will share it,.. keep posting
