Officially a teacher now

First official day of teaching my elementary school kids! Yesterday was my first day teaching my high school students. And... I can officially say that... well it's not hard, but it's a lot of work and you, as a teacher, need to be resilient.

I'm teaching some students with absolutely no English under their belts, and realised today that the yearly plan they're having me write is most probably going to be very loosely followed. I just dislike a lot that they're having me write this plan in the first place: how the heck can I know how much these kids are going to have learned by the end of July? I can't promise I can have decently covered the textbook by then! But, this is Korea, and image is everything. And by that I mean, the higher-ups want to see that you've worked your ass off writing this yearly plan so they can feel good about paying you down the road. It sucks, because I can't know how far we'll get through the book and so writing this plan feels like a waste of time, but *shrug* I guess I'll just have to suck it up and pretend like I'm following "The Plan". Which I probably won't.

I also learned today that I'm not teaching three classes a day at the elementary school, but rather five. Which isn't bad, but I would have liked to know before today!

The high school kids were pretty much awesome. I teach them on Tuesdays and Thursdays halfway across the town. That's my biggest complaint about that: from the start I was told I'd be teaching only at a high school and that usually means you live pretty close to your school. But no. I live a two-minute walk away from my elementary school, but something like an hour away from my high school. Logistically, wouldn't it have been better to house me somewhere halfway between both schools? Logically, yes, but I'm not even going to try to understand why I'm where I am. Things in Korea never make sense, which can be frustrating sometimes unless you go the way I'm going and just shrug your shoulders, make unintelligible sounds, and go on your merry way.

But yeah. Back to the high schoolers. They're great. I teach at Anione High School in Seongan, and it's kind of like a professional/technical high school: they have "majors" such as Cartooning, Computer Science, Animation, etc. That means they're super well behaved overall due to their higher focus on their studies. And they're overall pretty good at English. Some of the groups, less so, but generally they were really awesome and my co-teacher was impressed that they were willing to talk that much. They told me before starting that they wanted me to focus on speaking, reading and writing skills because they're "not good" but... to be quite honest I felt great because we made small talk and they were really good. So... woohoo for me!

Still need to work on getting it right with the elementary kids though!

I am a work-in-progress teacher!