Back to School and Freezing Hallways

It is funny celebrating the back to school season in March. I am used to spending my first few weeks of school secretly looking out the window wishing that I was outside and my tan wasn’t fading. This year, I am not finding myself gazing out the window and longing to be outside. The weather outside is still very cold and therefore it is also chilly inside school because the widows are left open most of the day. I still have extra layers of clothes at school to bundle up in when I can’t stand the cold anymore. The teachers at lunch the other day told me that most days I look like a polar bear because of how I bundle up in my white fleece to walk around the school. This is a picture from my walk to school last week on St. Patrick's Day.

I love my new schedule, which now includes teaching the first and second graders. Teaching all of the students in the school has allowed me to finally introduce myself to the younger students that used to run away from me in fear last semester. It is not everyday that children in Korea see a foreigner, and so to have one at school everyday that you never formally meet, must have seemed pretty strange to many of the students. Now, everyone knows my name, knows that I don’t bite and that I’m a normal person like them. I just happen to have been born in America and am a native English speaker.

Teaching so many different grades and such a wide variety of English ability levels has been a challenge, but a welcomed one. My lesson planning has become more creative and I have had to work very hard to create basic lessons where the directions for activities are pretty self-explanatory. If I say even one word of Korean in the classroom the students get so excited that I can speak Korean (in their eyes) that we end up off task for a minimum of five minutes while they quiz me about my language abilities. On the flip side, I also cannot say too many English words or I will lose their attention almost immediately. Clear communication skills are essential for teaching the young grades at my school.

As for the upper grades, it is great to have my students back in class. The Korean government has revised the third and fourth grade textbooks and I think that the new editions are a big improvement from the previous versions. The activities seem to be engaging the students better, and either that is because I am getting used to how to present them in an engaging way, or the material is stronger. My best guess is that it’s a mixture of both.

I am starting a research project with a professor from a local teaching university. She and I are implementing reading groups into fifth grade classes and teaching students strategies to help with their reading. We are using many methods of data collection that I learned in school and grouping students according to ability level. Reading groups and differentiated instruction are concepts that are not widely used in Korea and we are excited to see how our project works in the classroom. I will begin pretesting students this week and the study will continue throughout the rest of my time in Korea.