The kids.

English Land 1 class.
Ha Saog.
Do Hyun and Hyun Jung.
William (my student) and Ara in the teacher's lounge.

It has occured to me recently that you'd almost never know that we are English teachers here from the posts I publish on this blog. Most of them talk about places we're traveling to, local dishes, or things we're beginning to miss. I feel a little bad about that, probably since teaching English is a major part of our lives now. So here are a few words about the (my) experience...

The first three pictures above are of my English Land 1 kids (that's the name of the book we use--English Land). I only have them on Mondays and Fridays, and there's only 4 of them, but they're currently one of my favorite classes. They may not look it, but they're around 8 years old! Anyway, they're adorable kids and they're very excited about learning (probably because they haven't been through 10 years of hogwan yet...)

William, the young man on the left in the 4th picture, is in my TOEFL Writing class. For those of you who don't know, the TOEFL is the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and is required to assess a potential non-native applicant's use and understanding of Standard American English for English-speaking colleges and universities. There are 3 other students in his class (around age 14), and we practice having debates and writing persuasive and expository essays. I never enjoyed debates much when I was in school, but it's actually fun with these guys--they get quite competitive. So far we've hashed out the pros and cons of child sponsorship, using exams to assess students, electronically monitoring sex offenders, global warming, etc.

I also teach several phonics classes (which are probably my least favorite), a reading class, a conversation class, another writing class (all boys), and many TOEIC classes. TOEIC stands for Test of English for International Communication. All students take a TOEIC test for entrance into high school. The TOEIC books just give random vocabulary words, offer a little explanation, and then test the kids as they listen to different conversations with said vocabulary words. Since we have these students only twice (or in some cases, once) a week, they tend to forget these words rather quickly. Good thing that Koreans are good at cramming for a test :)

All in all, I teach 15 different classes per week. I also teach 2 informal classes called "AC" or "after classes". These classes don't have a book, so I get to do something fun in them (that's educational, of course). But that also means coming up with ideas, which is tough without a book. I'm fine with coming up with art projects, but those only last so long. I don't have the luxury of having objectives with them. So this has been a bit of a challenge.