Korean Job Discussion Forums

[some waygug-in]

Until I worked with a couple of my Korean co-teachers, I had no idea what bad really meant.

And I'm not trying to be mean or spiteful. I know they are well-meaning, but they really have no clue. The problem being, they are in charge of the class and I am the "trained monkey assistant".

My level 6 co-teacher is pulling stuff out of her nether regions 5 minutes before class, handing it to me with a semi-verbal, konglish-half-explanation (complete with hand signals and grunting ) and expecting me to know what to do with it. It doesn't matter what I prepare, she automatically overrides everything I try to do.

Not that the stuff she's attempting is all bad....she's actually had some good ideas and is trying to get away from the crappy textbook, but she won't discuss anything with me and she keeps changing things on the fly.

Today she went balistic on a class for 10 minutes. They were being disruptive, but I'd say that a large part of that is due to her boring, crappy lessons. She has no concept of developing a rapport with the students, she acts more like a drill seargeant at times and is quite prepared to physically attack students who happen to set her off.
I am trying to work with her, but it's getting increasingly difficult.

She comes in with a game that she wants me to explain to the students, Ok fine...but I need to know what the game is about or how can I explain anything? We get half way through the game and I see that it has a number of mistakes (not just grammatical errors but some sloppy errors as well) Things I could have corrected if she had gone over the thing with me. The end result was that the students became annoyed because the game was turning into a cluster-fark and the class ended with her screaming her head off at the students again.

I'm glad my level 5 teacher is a lot better to work with. (still not perfect, but at least she discusses things with me the day before)

[dmbfan]

[shantaram]

I had a teacher today who couldn't figure out how to use the ppt for the lesson introduction (a 5 minute slide show) properly so he just got students to come up the front and say whatever English they could think of as way of remark about the picture. The exercise was supposed to be about exclaiming "What a nice day!" Instead we had kids going up there, looking at the picture, saying one incomprehensible word and then saying ecstatically, "Teacher, I Englishee!" This charade went on for 30 minutes while I watched the lesson time drift away. We then attempted to cram the role play into the remaining lesson time, only the Korean teacher didn't even realise it was a role play (despite having played the CD Rom story twice) and got kids to do some strange thing to the script I had just handed out. I didn't understand what he was even doing. I had another class lining up outside because this travesty of a lesson went over time. I lost the will to even communicate with the teacher because it seemed we were on such different planets. I just gave up.

[kiwigal]

[JD1982]

[Young FRANKenstein]

[Horangi Munshin]

Oh man! My problems are very minor in comparison.

The worst I have is an afterschool co-teacher, she's not a bad teacher, she's a heck of a lot better than most other teachers.

The problem is I'm at that school two days a week, she's there everyday. I always ask where we'll be for my days. I need to make lesson plans that are checked by my supervisor.

I started preparing stuff to use for my bits, interesting games, extra material etc, but I soon found the lesson would change, the class would be ahead or behind of the bit planned so my stuff wouldn't get used.

You can guess what I did.

A few months down the track the co-teacher asked me why I didn't prepare something extra!

[some waygug-in]

[yingwenlaoshi]

Ha! I'll never work at a public school. Never.

[Wrench]

[JD1982]

[mrsquirrel]

[shantaram]

[some waygug-in]

And I'll never fart champagne...

but that's beside the point.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

We had a rookie temp at my middle school last year and I went along to help her with her extra listening class the first few times. What a mess. It took almost ten minutes just to sort out attendence and then she had a handout that had about 15 minutes worth of material on it. Almost no one was paying attentiion and I finally had to get up and do a patrol of the rows, telling students to put things away and pay attention (this was her class - not a 'co-teaching' class). I ended up just taking over from her and pulling things out of my ass. After a few lessons she ended up just showing them DVDs for the rest of the term.

But she was hot.