Hey everyone,

Sorry I haven't blogged for a long time. The heat has meant I have been unable to do much travelling and the teaching has not been going great. I'm going to post two blogs today. The first one will be about my teaching experiences over the past two months which have been quite negative so you might want to skip reading this post of me complaining a lot and read my next one about the exciting things I got up to in late September.

Let's start with summer camps. Each public school teacher has to teach summer camps and winter camps during school vacation (yes teachers in the west get it easy :P). My camps consisted of 9 days of 2 x 80 minute classes each day. Five days with my normal elementary school kids (grades 3-6) and four days with younger ones I don't normally teach - the grade 1 and 2's. It actually became 8 days in the end rather than 9 because the President of Korea decided that as the Friday was the 70th anniversary since the end of the Japanese occupation of Korea, we could all have an extra day off this year. Very nice!

I decided to do a space camp for my grade 3-6's and then a generic basic english camp for grades 1 & 2 covering basic introductions, colours, numbers and body parts. But the camps didn't go well. Grades 3-6 were rebelling when I tried to show them a star wars film for the last 20 minutes of each session and said it was boring - so I had to make some new activities quickly for the following days. I had them making craft things like aliens and UFO's too (it was meant to be a fun time) but they just chucked what they made in the bin afterwards - a real waste after my co-teacher and I had bought the materials out of our own money. Still, the space camp went better than with the one with the younger ones.

I have never taught the Grade 1 and 2's before and it quickly became a disaster. I had no co-teacher to help me explain basic classroom management things like rules and an attention signal. I had one particular kid who refused to sit in the circle and kept moving his chair. The kids kept hitting the puppet I used to say hi to each of them. Eventually on the last day I had to put one in the corner for repeatedly being badly behaved, but throughout the camp I really struggled to maintain any discipline in the class. I was very thankful when it was over as I had no energy left at all. Despite all these troubles, there was one great moment - at the end of the camp, when two of the young students came up and hugged me which was really nice.

After the camps it was straight back into teaching at middle school as the semester started there quite early. I was looking forward to getting back into to teaching them after my month off because I was quite excited about some changes I wanted to make - the introduction of the classcraft game which helps with classroom management and turns class into a game. It proved much harder to work than anticipated and it relies on a good internet connection and a good working knowledge of every kid's name so I had to scrap that idea within a week or two. Then there was the introduction of "whole brain teaching" which emphasises getting students to use their whole brain and more movement/ gestures to remember rules/ concepts e.t.c. I introduced this the first day and I could tell the kids hated it - trying to get them to do gestures/ actions was like pulling teeth. Trying to explain the idea that they should teach each other too went down like a lead brick. Needless to say I scrapped most of that after the first lesson. I also introduced new rules - which I had translated into korean so they knew what they were (be prepared, be prompt, be polite, be productive, be positive).

The following monday I was ill so couldn't go in, but then during that week I was in there on Tuesday - Thursday as the elementary school was still closed. I was able to catch up on one lesson with them and got them all to make a nice notebook. Of course, it was a bit complicated (the idea was it would be a student interactive notebook - google it) and they didn't understand the concept of "contents page" so when I came in on the Friday half of them had written normal class notes over the contents pages. Still, despite these initial bumps on the road, I thought we could iron them out. Then came Friday's lessons on 4th September - these were a disaster! In my grade 1 of middle school class I had a kid so upset he threw a pen across the room and when I tried to comfort him and find out what was wrong he lashed out and hit me. No one was listening and they hadn't done their homework so we had to spend half the class doing it so I didn't get through what I needed to teach that lesson. Then in my grade 3 class the communication game from the textbook was so complicated to explain that it took almost the entire lesson and we couldn't play it. By the end of the day I was determined to make significant changes.

The previous couple of days I had spent researching about classroom management and came to the conclusion that a significant cause of the many problems I was facing was that while I had introduced rules/ consequences to them as suggested for the first lesson, I had not introduced procedures/ routines so they had little idea of exactly how to behave. I spent the Thursday creating a classroom management plan and powerpoint presentations so I could explain this to them in easy to understand ways.

When Monday came and I had my after school classes, I postponed my original lesson plans and spent the time going through the new procedures. The reactions I got made me much more hopeful that things would begin to start working out. I changed the way I do classroom behaviour management by introducing a soccer style yellow and red card system, a raffle ticket system for when they behave and a new attention getter. I introduced bathroom passes, I explained exactly what they should do when the enter class & leave class, how to do their homework, what to bring to class, what to do when they want to ask a question and many other procedures. Then a miracle happened - my new attention getter is to raise my hand and count down from 5 after which they must be silent, look at me and have hands folded. And it worked - my grade 1's finally shut up and listened to me in silence - for the first time I can remember! But…..things didn't last long and despite the new procedures I am still having problems with discipline in the class. I also think they haven't quite got the hang of everyone shutting up after I've counted down to one.

Tuesday I was back to Elementary school. I met my new co-teacher as my previous one has gone on maternity leave. We had no lessons the first day which I was thankful for as it gave me time to get lesson planning done. I also found out I didn't have after school classes in elementary school till after Chuseok so that is nice and means my afternoons are free for a few weeks to really get things prepared. I decided I will start the after school classes with 5 weeks of learning the top 100 most common words in the English language because apparently if you can read those - you can read 50% of most modern english books or newspapers.

The lessons with the elementary school kids went okish but I had some behaviour issues with the grade 5's so I put them in different seating which helped. Annoyingly we were in a temporary building until Chuseok so I couldn't introduce much in the way of my new procedures/ routines (which I'd planned to use the first after school class for) so I had to wait till 30th September to explain these to the students. I'm hoping they understood them.

One positive for me was that in my middle school afterschool class, 3 students were taken out for extra catch-up lessons, including one with really bad behaviour problems, which meant I have more chances to spend time helping one of the other kids with bad behaviour and can help him to believe more in his English ability. I also found out one of the reasons my grade 1's had said to me they didn't like English was because they thought it wasn't fun, so I have decided to make some further changes and introduce more games, including a warm up game of countdown in each lesson - hopefully we will have enough time to play them when the textbook takes up so much time.

Finally, I spent a lot of August and September feeling quite homesick and especially missing my boyfriend David, however now his flight is booked and he will be here in two months, I'm finally feeling more positive and excited.