My Job

I haven't really done anything that exciting these past few weeks so I am at a bit of a loss for what to write about. I could tell you about the training for the program changes for next term (boorring) or about how much fun I had shopping in Myeong Dong (again), but somehow I don't think that would be all that interesting to read about.

I think this is a good time to tell you a little bit more about what I actually DO here in Korea. Particularly about the "school" I work at.


That would be me looking like an idiot in front of the main level of my school (we actually take up 3 floors of a business building... it's kind of strange).

I say "school" because it is not actually a school. Yes, kids come here to learn, but it is actually a hagwon or after school academy. There are branches all over Korea and some in China, Japan, and the Phillipines. There is even an immersion school in Vancouver, Canada where students can go study for three months away from home! Sounds like a terror to me!



These are my class rules. Of course I caught a kid trying to cross out English with KOREAN. Don't you love that he was going to write KOREAN in English? It makes me laugh. :)

Students come to Chungdahm 3 hours at a time usually twice a week. A normal full 6 hour teaching day for me starts at 3pm when I come and print off all the handouts, tests, and other class papers for the lessons I prepped for the day. I might load a youtube video or find some supplementary pictures to go along with the day's topic as well.

Class starts at 4pm. I have anywhere from two to fifteen students in any given class. This is really nice after having thirty-five plus students in my student teaching classes.

I teach two different programs at Chungdahm, both for very different levels of English learners. Each level has a workbook in which we complete a lesson a day. In my Memory Giga (lower level English skills) we start off reviewing homework, a short review test (on the first class of the week; we meet twice a week in this class) and a preview of some of the vocabulary they will see that day. Then we do a few activities including word associations and using context clues to find the meanings of words before our break after the first hour.

Once the kids come back from their five minute break, we start reading a short story and answer comprehension questions. Because this is a lower level class, we focus on simple skills like looking for pronouns (these really throw the kids because Korean does not have words like he, she, or it to replace nouns) and transition words to help them comprehend what is going on in the story.

Then there is a short listening section where they pretty much listen to someone read the story and they fill in the missing words on a worksheet. I personally find this portion pretty pointless.

After some more reading skill practice and a second break, we have group project time. The students are given a task that they must complete with a group and then present at the end of the class.


I like to post some of the more artistic projects on my (nicely labeled) bulletin board. :)

The other program I teach is called the 2020 Project. I teach level 4 2020 which is mid-level English skills. Korea is really focused on the year 2020 as a goal year I've noticed. Many companies are saying that such and such will be improved by the year 2020. This class focuses on developing the essential traits of a global leader. Each term we read two books that Chungdahm has determined will be considered "classic" young adult novels by the year 2020. We focus less on reading skills (they are supposed to learn about those in their other English classes at Chungdahm) and focus more on getting them to talk critically about the ideas presented in the book. We don't actually do much reading in the class itself since they are supposed to do all the reading for homework at home (you can see part of the problem).

Like Memory, the last hour is spent in group work. However, rather than a task, in the 2020 program, students are given a problem that they need to provide a solution to and then present to the class.

And that's my daily schedule for the most part. On a full day, I will have two 3-hour classes back to back. One at 4pm to 7pm and one at 7pm to 10pm. 4pm is Elementary school classes and 7pm classes are mostly middle school.

To give you a more visual idea of where I work, here is a promotional video for Chungdahm. This is even of my branch: the Mokdong branch!! This was taken about a year before I came, so I'm not in it (sad) but a lot of the people in the video are people that I work with.



Of course, the school is not as perfect as they make it look in the video. I want to know what they did to make those classrooms in the video look like they don't have "Blow Up Chungdahm" buttons graffiti-ed all over the wall. They look practically clean! Gasp! I'll give you a better idea about some of the great things about the hagwon and some of the crappier things about the school in a later post. :)