10:45 AM: First class went well! Oh, for the first time ever, I started out the first grade lessons by being not-boring. The small beautiful people of 1-7, 1-8 B had a good time.
Who's in there: Hyo, Hyunmin, Cutiepie BFF's Chanjin
& Mingyu, Cool-Hyunjoon, Smart-but-Stubborn-Hyukjae, Sleepy-Front-Row
Moonshik, Next-to-Hyo-Minjoon, Sits-Behind-Hyukjae-Hyunwoo,
Poet-Necktie-Jangyeop.
It's chock full of kids I know, which doesn't mean I'm devoid of nervousness when it comes to their lesson. But! I played a fun video while I drew up a spelling game for the boys and I put a "Team Points" grid on the board at the start of class. Team 1, 2, 3, and 4, all with $20 written under them. We were learning about money, so the points came in the form of dollars.
We listened to a song about money and did a worksheet. For every pair of kids who finished their worksheet, I drew "+$5"on their paper, then increased their team's score on the board. It was a great motivator--unless you're interested in English, there's no reason to do the whole worksheet, but you'll produce plenty of language when you're working to get your team points--points which lead directly to chocolate. :-)
After the worksheets were all done (and for the first time in recent memory, they were all done-- SmartStubborn-Hyukjae even woke up Hyunwoo, the sleepy kid behind him, to make Hyunwoo do the worksheet and thereby get 5 more dollars for their team), we played a comparatives game with a betting element.
Example: The kids guess which is taller, a famous Korean building or the Eiffel Tower? After they choose which they think is higher, I ask them how many dollars they want to bet. If you have $25 dollars in your team's account and you bet $5, you could rise to the highest-ranking team if you're right, or plummet to the lowest. Early on, the bets were conservative ($1), until they got in the swing of things. Then Team 3 went all out and bet their whole $25 dollars, getting them up to a total of $50.
You could argue that it's teaching children gambling, but I like it as an intellectual exercise, making a person wonder, "How certain are you of your decision? What do you stand to gain if you're right, and what do you stand to lose if you're wrong?" Logic games are always fun. In this case, nothing was lost because no one had chocolate; you merely gained a chance at future chocolate if you chose well and took measured risks.
They loved it. At the end, my adorable troublemaker Hyunmin's team won (I was hoping they would because Hyunmin has very low interest in English), and I also gave chocolate to Smart-Stubborn-Hyukjae because in our final spelling game, he guessed the word "Tiger" with only the clues of "animal" "five letters" and "middle letter is a G". Hyukjae's really close to being A-class, I think.
Any-hoodle-poodle, it was a lovely morning class and the kids were happy, and I'm hopefully putting together something really nice for my 3rd-graders, coming up soon.
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1 PM: Well, I thought 3-5, 3-6 B was going well, but then Mr. B stopped the class and made the boys stand up for two minutes with their eyes closed and their hands on their heads while he lectured them, presumably about the proper way to treat me. He told me, "They're not listening to you, let me talk to them." And sure, plenty of them weren't listening, but that's par for the course. I was just going to explain in all to each kid individually, anyway, so this caught me by surprise.
So I wound up feeling kind of failure-y again because I couldn't even tell that things were going badly. But the boys learned the expressions, "How long does it take you to?" and "I takes me about____minutes," and we watched 2 fun videos and played the betting game I used with the 1st-graders because I need their attention.
It was definitely more interesting than usual. I really, really tried to make it good. And they were mostly bright. Teacher's Pet Jeongmin was his usual adora-bratty self, telling me to hurry up in English, then apologizing profusely. Yeonghyo told me he'd seen me Saturday night, which was true--I was the one to greet him. Seongjae wanted me to write a smiley face on his hand for doing a good job, as always. Hyunjoon got a new haircut and when I told him it looked nice he said, "Thank you. I know." Hyunjoon's pretty funny.
I want to pick my mood up for the next 2 classes. I'm a little down about 3-5, 3-6 B's apparent discipline problem, but as far as I can tell, the boys and I still get along nicely, which is what I really must have.
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1:30 PM Got a fresh pickup line from a first-grader who was being piggyback-carried by Snappy-Seongsu: "Pretty girl! Wow! Oh, pretty girl date! I, you, date GO!" I told him he was cute, because he was. There's just no way you can feel objectified by a 13-year-old being laboriously transported by his buddy.
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9:30 PM My two classes of B-level 2nd grade went fine. One of my darling afterschool boys, Jinseop, is int the first class (2-9, 2-10 B I think?), and he gives his best effort at everything. On a day when a lot of boys couldn't give a care, I wanted to hug him for his dedication.
In 2-7, 2-8 B, I have three new names:
Chansu wears a red sweater and looks like a first-grader. He's quite cute but at first I though he was mocking me because he spoke English in a very high, super-perky voice. Nope. Chansu just has a high-pitched voice and a penchant for saying things with enthusiasm. After I sat next to him and told him he was smart, he visibly brightened and he was my boy for the rest of class, waving his hand and trying to answer every question.
Jeongbok wears glasses, is intelligent, and is friends with my afterschool boy Cardsharp Minsu, and when Jeongbok doesn't understand a question, he asks me in Korean to explain it in Korean. And then I try to do so. Thanks for your faith in my tenuous grasp on my 2nd language, sweetheart! When I wrote his name on my hand, he corrected the spelling--he wants to be known as Jungbok, with a u. And so he shall be.
Third kid is Jolly-Looking-Sanghyeop, who I met in the hallways before because I mistook him for one of the Jeongmins. Sanhyeop has one of those faces that, even when sad and tired, looks as if he's about to bust out the gingerbread cookies and Christmas presents to enliven the classroom.
So I had some right nice boys in 2-7, 2-8 B, but I nearly felt like the class was a failure because I came close to losing a confrontation with Cardsharp-Minsu. Bless his heart, he's one of the boys I can't push. Most kids, you nudge them and they give in, you insist that they perform feats of language and they do. Not so, Minsu. My desire to have Minsu do stuff is but a speck compared to the mountain that is Minsu's desire to Not Do Stuff.
I still hadn't learned my lesson about him, because when he put his head on his desk while I was talking to him, I rubbed his hair to get him to sit up. He reached for a jacket to pull over his head and I tugged it away from him after a while, but it was an utterly unprofessional tug of war for a few seconds. Why did I do that? Who cares if Minsu puts a jacket over his head? And why did I think that taking it away was going to go well? Because it worked on Peter-Pan-Taehoon and Grumpmaster-Jiwoong, that's why. But those two boys, oddly enough, can be charmed by me and Minsu cannot.
How to win over Minsu? More praise, less pressure? I've said before that he's like a cat, and good luck training a cat to do tricks. Rewards and punishments are meaningless to an entity who doesn't see the point in the whole exercise anyway.
But speaking of Taehoon and Jiwoong, they came by the class at the end, while I was handing out chocolate to the winners of the final game, and they know the routine--in exchange for a little English, they can wheedle their way into some good chocolate. Jiwoong pleasantly said, "I want chocolate," then waited to be told how he could get it. This time I asked him to tell me the name of his favorite movie. He replied, "My favorite movie is The Hobbit," nice as you please.
Taehoon also walked up: "Teacher. I want chocolate. Give me chocolate." It's more polite than it sounds--in Korean there is no word for "please"--the politeness of a question comes from the formality of the verb ending you choose for your sentence. So in English you go to a cafe and say, "I'd like a coffee, please" but in Korean you just say "give me coffee". But you add a verb ending (요 'yo') that makes the demand polite. With the boys, sometimes they forget to say please, but the politeness is evident (or not) from their tone of conversation. Taehoon's favorite movie is the Avengers, and he got his chocolate, too.
I went to a meeting downtown for judges for an upcoming English competition, and since I'm a middle school teacher, I'll be judging the elementary skits. Which is good, because I couldn't even pretend to be an unbiased judge if I had to judge my boys in a middle school speech competition. As it is, I get to help them prepare for the competition and then step aside and judge in a different room when crunch time comes.
Went out for dinner tonight and one of the students came running out of a building. I knew it was one of mine from the, "Whup! Huh?!" sound he made. When kids at my school see me, they often make a wordless exclamation of surprise, like they've just been tackled in a football game. This boy who I didn't recognize happily chattered, "____Jung-hakyo!" I smiled and said yes, I worked there, did he go to school there? Yes, he said in Korean, he's a third-grader. I didn't recognize his face, so I asked "A-ban?" thinking he might be higher than the level I teach (I only get the B-level 3rd grades), but he said no, he's C-ban. But he was brave enough to talk to me in all Korean, and it was good to have someone who was happy to see me.
Some child in the backseat of a minivan said "hello!" to me as I walked back to my apartment, but it was too dark for me to see which one it was. Again, it was nice to have a kid care enough to roll down their window and say howdy. :-)
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