Winter Vacation Part 3 - Teacher you are loser

The third week went pretty well. I had a class of fifth grade boys that were all extremely excellent with English and just needed to refine some basic grammar points, and then a class of sixth grade students who could barely form a sentence or understand simple questions (two or three of the boys couldn't read or write - this is a serious problem for them, because the Korean education system is just gonna make things worse and worse for them as they go along, without being able to provide them with any sort of real help in this area).

But, I try not to measure my students by how well they speak English. I usually just judge them according to height and skin color.

Seriously though, I judge my students by how hard they try and how nice they are to each other. The jerks get little to none of my attention, and the kids who absolutely do not want to put forth any effort get treated like little toddlers until they learn to cowboy up and start doing some work.

So, that being said, both classes were full of kids who were nice and wanted to learn, so we had a really good week. We did not learn 150 words like my principal had asked. Unfortunately, my principal, just like most Koreans (and, most language learners) doesn't understand that knowing the literal translations of 150 words is a lot less important than understanding how to put together 30 or 40 new words and combine them to form different thoughts and ideas.

This leads me to another rant. Last year in Busan I had a great student who was extremely eager to learn English, but I always felt sorry for him because he prided himself on knowing thousands of words (which he did...it was easy to see that he knew about 3000-5000) but his ability to form sentences correctly was so limited that he could rarely get his point across. I've encountered this same problem with around 80% of the Koreans I've spoken to out here, and I've come to despise this line of reasoning.

Anyways, we got through the week. Some of the highlights were the 5th graders asking me in the middle of class if I had any balls (seriously, they actually wanted to know if I had private parts, but they just didn't know how to say it correctly), and the 6th graders just being able to trust their ears to hear simple phrases on Spongebob, cause at the beginning of the week they just couldn't pick out anything, but by the end they were able to better understand the flow and intonations. I guess the best example was when I asked one of the lowest-level 6th grade boys what Squidward had said, and he hesitantly replied, "Where's Spongebob?" and I really praised him cause at the beginning of the week he would've never even tried to attempt a response.

It was a good week.

Next: Dubai