Mallory Teacher

Well, the job has started. To be honest, I was so concentrated on the big move, that I hardly had time to think about actually teaching, so I was relieved when I got through the first day. Before I can fairly talk about my job, here's a couple of facts about education in Korea:

-Public education here is a bit of a joke. Students attend school during the day (they have hours the same as American students). Schools teach various subjects including English, P.E., Korean History, Mathematics and so on. Most parents send their students to public schools for ranking purposes, something that is very important here.

-As a result, hagwons are employed. A hagwon is basically an private after school program where parents pay for lessons in one specific area. My school teaches English, but there are piano hagwons, Tae Kwon Do hagwons, and so on and so forth. All of that schooling usually means that children can go to school for over 15 hours a day. It can be tiring.

-Most hagwons are all about the cash because they know that parents will pay top dollar for their kids to learn. With English, some parents are monitoring their students learning, which means "lessons" mean the kids just waste time for an hour and the "teacher" gets paid. It's sad.

So my boss, Troy, was a coordinating teacher in Seoul for a couple of years and getting frustrated with the way that things were being run. At his last job, a Korean co-worker of his, Lauren, finally convinced him to open up his own school and with the costs being relatively low, he agreed. The set up of our school is a lot different than others. Troy tests students into a "level" 2-5, not according to age. This makes teaching a lot easier.

Students are all very great. Gi Hae, which I found is actually spelled Ji Hyae, is in my E2 class. Trying to teach a 5 year-old English is not the coolest, but I am sure I will get used to telling to her to sit down every 2 minutes. Classes are pretty cut and dry, we use a curriculum and use storybooks as platforms for vocabulary which help with context. So that's the teaching thus far, I am sure I will add quotes from students later. Here's the first one:

I was asking students what they would do with $100,000 (the title of the book we are reading) and he replied "I would take it to LasBegas." The letter "V" doesn't exist in the Korean alphabet, neither does "l", "z", "f" or "th". So that makes teaching English the greatest.