Korean Job Discussion Forums

[MA_TESOL]

where is the balance between creating a relaxed teaching atmosphere and maintaining a professional demeanor.
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I like to joke around a little and talk with my students about their lives. This does not dominate my time in the classroom, but I am questioning if I should not be more professional.

What I mean by more professional is to always stay on topic, not get too familiar with students and their lives and keep a distance.

To be honest, I have not come to a comfortable conclusion. I do believe that when the affective filter is lowered and students are laughing that they will enjoy class more and learn more by way of participation.

Would like to hear your thoughts and ideas on this.

[cruisemonkey]

[the_beaver]

I'm of the opinion that if you don't have some kind of personal interaction with the students you might as well just give them a textbook and be off.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Schools should be run like a business with education being the product and students the interchangeable vessel for the product. Teachers should assign a number to each seat and call each student by that number whenever they speak to him, inside or outside of class. Anything else is just sentimental foofara.

[Kikomom]

Oh just start with animal noises in kindy then.

Mids can be veggies.

[aka Dave]

What are you teaching? Most of my Uni. classes are conversation. Therefore, we talk a ton about their interests, pursuits, goals; about their lives, in sum, because the goal is as much conversation as possible in a relaxed atmoshpere that lowers the affective filter (and remember, Korean's have a very high affective filter; creating a classroom atmosphere that fosters easy conversation is crucial to a conversation class).

Late in the semester, I still have students who are visibly nervous speaking in front of class. I taught French at American universities, and by the third week everyone was quite comfortable speaking. Not so in Korea, students are still jittery, nervous late in the term.

That hurts their development. Ideally, you'd want every student to be passionate in speaking out and participating (you get students like this, however you have to be wary of letting them dominate discussions).

So, in conversation classes, I opt for a casual atmosphere. In my writing classes, it's all about the writing and if we have a discussion it's about linguistic theory. Generally, however, we're correcting papers, going over stucture, etc.

So writing classes differ a bit from conversation class in terms of classroom atmosphere. As far as dress, I wear a polo shirt and khaki shorts. Why? Because it's July it's dang hot (teaching a summer immersion program), because I'm from Southern California and we wear shorts, and because in my department I can.