Dear Friends and Family,

My students had just begun their lesson warm-up (“with a partner, please discuss world events that make you sad”), when the alarm began to sound. My students continued their discussions while I lifted my ear from monitoring their conversations to the open windows just as the alarm again sounded, clearly coming from outside our school campus. The noise was insistent but not urgent but North Korea was on my mind and I couldn’t disguise my anxiety. Over the next noise, one of the boys grinned at me and said “don’t worry, teacher, that is just North Korea attacking.” The warm-up talk turned to quiet chuckles while I responded by rolling my eyes at him.

That is how I learned that on the 15th of every month, the South Korean army runs a country-wide, 15 minute, traffic-stopping drill every month. My co-teacher and guiding teacher’s chuckles were somewhat less than quiet when I inquired into the nature of the alarms. I rolled my eyes at them too.

This provides a quick glimpse of the nervousness that I keep tucked below the surface while providing an entrée into my classroom, my school.

My students at Taegu Foreign Language High School (“TFLHS”) are diligent and generally intelligent. They had to test into merely attending TFLHS, they attend classes from Monday – Saturday, returning to their families every other weekend. They board at school and breakfast is at 7 am, then they alternately study and attend classes until evening (sometimes very late in the evening), do “extra curricular” activities such as the school newspaper or movie-making clubs, and their lights-out bell rings at 11 pm. They are busy! And on top of that, their determined parents often pay to have them privately tutored or to attend private academies in order to further supplement their education. And as if this weren’t enough, my students are tested, tested, and tested more. I’m still examining the whys + what fors of the Korean education system but I am amazed by the amount of time that my students spend in class and studying.

My job, and that of my British co-teacher with whom I split the classes with, is to work with 12 classes of sophomores and juniors on their English Conversational skills. Our goal is to enable students to practice the production of good-quality verbal English, and to help them improve it. Our job is done best when the students move around, talk a lot, and have a constructive amount of enjoyment, which puts us in a position to be “fun” and “popular” teachers. And the excitement caused by my brand-new face and American accent has worked in my favor, students are, at the very least, not unhappy to be walk into my class. And I’m diligent attempting to fulfill all expectations: creating fun, challenging, student-based learning, adhering to the finer points of my CELTA training, and working with different discussion topics than my British co-teacher.

Class starts when I prompt “Captain?” and a student stands up and calls “Attention, bow.” All the students bow their heads and say “good morning, ma’am” – although some of them slip up and say good morning “sir” – which causes us all to giggle. I greet them and fall back on my unconsciously developed habit of telling them that I’m really happy to have them and sharing the topic of our lesson’s discussion. I’m not teaching from a book (I could, but it is crap) and I plan my lessons striving to create interesting discussion topics with varied interaction patterns. My favorite lesson so far has been about dreams: they discuss their dreams, then as a class we free-range brain-storm using Dali paintings, listen to an obscure American pop song, and then the students write and perform their own “song” lyrics. I love watching the students’ faces during the first minute of the song. I can tell from their carefully blank faces that they totally expect that they are going to be listening to a song with melodious singing, ala “My Favorite Things.” It is a sure sign that the lesson is going to go well when their fingers begin to tap to the beat, they let a smile slip at the sound effects, and look exasperated nonsensical words. And their resulting lyrics are fun. One pair wrote that they were flushed down the toilet and landed in Hawaii, several have paid back not nice-teachers in interesting ways, and today a pair made a striped horse and white zebra fall in such deep love that they exchanged stripes. I enjoy their creativity and their humor; they enjoy the instructive break from their rigorous studies.

Some of the English teachers at my school are fond of the sophomores but I greatly enjoy working with the slightly more mature juniors. I suppose this to be because in addition to my conversational teaching, I’m team-teaching junior-level English Lit/Reading Comprehension with a Korean teacher. I find this challenging not in the least because she and I are very different – the differences can be boiled down to the fact that I am loud & native English-speaking while she is not. Anyway, at first when I wanted a turn working with the students on comprehension, I’d direct questions to the unresponsive class and she’d answer on behalf of the students. Grrrr. But we’ve somewhat ironed that out and are both learning from each other. I’m learning the importance of grammar when it comes to decoding the English language and she has learned to demonstrate concepts with illustrations and use character voices when reading aloud (as I have from the beginning). One day she told me that she really wanted the students to discuss an idea. I advised that we should give them pair talk time and then open a class discussion. She told me that they wouldn’t talk. I insisted that they would. We compromised by deciding to try it once her way and once my way. We never tried it her way – after our successful class, her smile practically split her face. But good teaching moments in that class feel like the exception rather than the rule. We’re still in the process of improving (ok, who isn’t?) but at least we are both enthusiastic about the work and willing to work together. And, thank the maker, the students smile when I walk through their reading comprehension classroom door.

Besides my usual classes and reading comprehension, I’ve found myself a sometimes proof-reader, sometimes college interview coach and sometimes essay writing judge. These tasks cause extra work to be sure, but they also bring me in contact with students and teachers in varied ways and I enjoy that. Well, I do groan at the very thought of proof-reading, which is time-consuming and can be truly hard work as Korean writing skills are definitely lower than their speaking skills – and neither are truly high. Anyway, I have promised myself to work on my work/life balance this year and by staying late at school, I’m likely violating that self-promise – although right now my occasional late evenings are working because I’m enjoying them and because I don’t have a lot to pull me away from school. Also, because I get Saturdays off when my peers do not as well as unofficial paid vacation days, I feel compelled to graciously lend as-necessary assistance, even if it goes beyond work hours. And when I work late, the cafeteria serves me dinner, which gives me pleasant company for dinner and saves me dishwashing.

Thursday and Friday of this week are half days in order for us all to enjoy “the school festival.” I’m a little vague on what this entails however the first warning sign was a project to proof-read an English only play called “Snow White and the Five Dwarves.” Seven was too many characters! The next warning was an instant message advising that I had been scheduled to pose for a festival poster. That had me scurrying over to my British co-teacher’s desk to ensure that he was also scheduled to share my pain. He was. The next day we spent an hour with two students in various poses in various spots around campus. The resulting poster was one of the first to be hung around campus. Granted, I’m beyond picky when it comes to pictures of me and the likelihood in pleasing me on this wasn’t great but I must tell you all that the poster all over the school did not catch me in a flattering pose. Yesterday, I noticed a few girls giggling over it. [grimace] But festival anticipation is high and no more noises have alarmed me… and now, I must return to revising my latest lesson…

I hope you all are well…

Laura