school time is play time
Posted in Korea on 12/07/2009 04:50 pm by chrissyToday was such a fun day of teaching, I feel like I just havvve to tell you all about it. I wish I could carry around a hidden camera all day, and then peice together funny clips from the entire day. All my kids are just sooo cute, and I love getting to know them better. My co-teacher didn’t come to most of my classes today, so I tried to take advantage of my time alone with the kids to get them to loosen up a bit. I feel like sometimes they’re too scared of making mistakes, and probably intimidated by having a new unfamiliar teacher, that they’re afraid to try in class or participate much. So my goal for the next few weeks (the Korean school year ends Dec 21) is to get them to just loosen up a little and have fun, so that hopefully by next year they’ll be ready to come back and get to work on making some real progress with their English. That’s the theory at least…
A lot of other elementary teachers say their 6th graders are a real handful, but I seem to have the opposite problem. My 6-3 (6th grade, class #3) class just SITS there and stare at me, never raise their hands, never answer questions. A big part of the problem is their English comprehension is veryyyy low (even lower than some of my 4th graders?) and I think they are just a genuinely shy group. So I decided to hurry through the lesson, and we spent the last part of class getting some “culture” lessons on American music. So of courrrrse I had to show them the “New York” video by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, and “Single Ladies” by Beyonce. I think they’d heard the songs before, but hadn’t seen the videos so they thought it was just hilarrrrious. Judging by their dance skills, a few of them might be destined to be the next Jay Z or Beyonces.
The 4-1 and 4-2 classes seemed to have the opposite problem from the 6th graders… Rather than being too shy, they were just uncontrollably noisy and couldn’t stop goofing around. They were still really helpful during the lesson and completed the role play and finished the little coloring project the book required, but they were very chatty. So I decided to let them loose on “Naver”– which is like the Korean version of google I guess– and pull up a bunch of Korean pop songs. They kept pointing at eachother saying who the good dancers were, so finally I picked 5 kids to go in the back and give us their best 2PM performance. I am realllly sad because my camera died halfway through (of all times to have a low battery!), and so I only caught the mediocre group. Their dancing COULD have been just as good, but they just didn’t put nearly the same amount of energy into it as the other class. But oh well, I’m sure we will have many performances ahead of us. Especially if Mrs. Kim keeps letting me go crazy with them all by myself!!!
The video won’t work right now, but you can see it on facebook if you’re my friend there…. I’ll try again tomorrow.
In Daycare class we played UNO and Halli Galli, and the kids fully governed themselves. I love just watching them play and tease eachother and celebrates their wins. It’s all in Korean so I don’t know what they’re actually saying, but it’s funny how with kids you can put the pieces together because they are just so expressive. Usually I just watch them and laugh and make up conversations for them and play referee when they start fighting over who won, who cheated, who was mean, etc etc. I feel bad because I’ll watch a few of them bickering, and then suddenly one will just burst into tears and cry uncontrollably. It’s hard to console when you don’t know why they’re sad, and it’s nearly impossible to punish anyone when you don’t know who said the mean thing that caused the cryer to cry. So mostly I just try to stay cheerful, hand out lots of hugs, and distract them with funny songs. Days like today make me feel like I could probably be a teacher forever, and love it.
