Korean Job Discussion Forums

[thegadfly]

[rayray123]

I can only talk about my public hs experience...

I taught about 19 fifty minute classes per week. I taught the same thing to every class each week, so I needed one lesson plan per week. I did my lesson plans the week before. My co teachers didn't want me to follow the book. They just wanted me to do something more fun that involved speaking or listening.

My first semester there one of my co teachers wanted to talk to me about lesson plans the week before I taught them and talk to me about how my teaching was going. It was mostly helpful since I had not taught before. Second semester he stopped checking my lesson plans.

Other than talking to that one guy, I didn't talk to my co teachers about what I had planned for class. All they did during class was translate for me and help with discipline.

[warmachinenkorea]

I do my best to practice with the kids.

I'm a certified Special Ed teacher in The States. This job is similar. I'm in a rural area and all my kids and the teachers are worried about is the national exams. My teachers have told me they will "teach" the material and I'm supposed to make activities so the kids can practice.

Sometimes I get ahead of my teachers because they've had some kind of bump in the road and forgot to tell me. When this happens the lesson can be a mess. When I first got here I tried my first 6 months to actually teach. The kid's and my co-worker's English level was so low everyone, including myself was lost and frustrated. I took a real hit on my teaching ability. I had good evaluations and peer review back home at my previous school but the level of failing here made me question my ability. Then I began teaching teachers in the local area. (part of my contract) I was complemented by them and the higher ups that everyone liked my classes they were engaging, fun and interesting. This, of course, gave me more job satisfaction. But now they have done away with the adult classes and I'm teaching only kids again. I was offered a university job this weekend that will begin in March. I'm seriously considering breaking my PS contract to take it.

OP and others. Public school is good for some and not others. Personally I would be miserable teaching kids at a hagwon. All those classes in a row, unruly kids, and some crazy managers. (I know this is not all hagwons but 75% from what I hear others say) But some people thrive in the hagwon environment.

Lesson planning is gonna be needed in any teaching environment. Sounds like your other job is not where you wanna be. Give PS a try and if it doesn't work then... There's always barber college.

[vchampea]

[mmstyle]

Like gadfly, I sometimes take ideas from other teachers, but I never use anything directly. I always tweak and change, and usually just take an idea I see and make it up in whatever program I can so that I can modify it as needed. Usually, I come up with most of my units on my own, and get ideas that I still need to work up from various places. I wish I could come up with more variety, but sometimes being able to work from your own template is the only way to do it in a timely manner. I am now tweaking stuff from past years, but since things are always changing, sometimes my old plans aren't even usable.

I do my planning in spurts. I will spend a week making a unit or two, planning like crazy, and then I will have a week where I only change something small. If I were doing this back home, and confident that things were usable next year, then I would work on being a lot more organized. One of the toughest things for me to do is to keep track of where 18 different classes, of 3 grades and multiple levels of students (who have classes canceled for a variety of reasons) are in my units, while teaching and creating all this stuff at the same time. I have 400 students and I don't have a way to track them like the Korean teachers do-because I stopped keeping track after I started my 2nd year and realized I would have to change everything manually....and I have almost no grade input, so why bother? I often think I do way too much...and I've pretty much burned myself out. All this being said, this may not be the experience of the average native speaking teacher.

vchampea...no my lessons are 45 mins each.

[Modernist]

Oh, look. The champion teachers are at it again.

A lot of your life here will depend on just how INTENSE you choose to make things for yourself. If you want to play gadfly and that ilk's game, be a REAL TEACHER and run yourself ragged, you certainly can. But it won't get you much from your school. The kids won't care; half of them or more won't understand the difference between a CHAMPION TEACHER lesson and one that's, well, not. The CTs won't know one way or the other either, unless you are teaching at an elite school. And let's not forget how much extra money you'll get for all this extra effort: $0. But hey, you'll have a warm feeling of approval from anonymous posters on an Internet forum who will assure you that, now, you are Actually A Teacher. Congratulations.

Or you can go to Waygook, help others as best you can, and also download so many LPs you'll never use them all. That's your choice.

How serious are you about this whole exercise? My position is clear: get your money and get on a plane as soon as you do. What's yours?

And on the directly helpful side, I will tell you that in my MS, I teach 3 grades of students, broken into 2 groups per level. 6 basic lessons, with 4 more 'special classes' added on per week. My CTs get very annoyed if I stray far from the [horrible] textbook, so I usually don't. The students are mostly bored but I don't particularly care. I'm not going to go to war with the administration here over it. I have managed to let them do PPTs/videos at the beginning and end of class, so it helps somewhat.

Bottom line is there's no way whatsoever to predict it, because everything comes down to the CTs and their philosophy. This includes how much LPing you will have to do. An upside is that you likely will be able to repeat them with different classes.

[vchampea]

[rayray123]

[thegadfly]

[thegadfly]

vchampea,

There is nothing wrong with striking a balance between your personal life and your job, and there is nothing wrong with not wanting to do extra work for which one is not paid. There is a whole lot of middle ground between "being run ragged" and "doing jack." There is also a whole lot of middle ground between crappy teaching and excellent teaching. My issue is with anyone that finds crappy teaching acceptable, and with anyone who thinks "doing jack for prep and planning" should be the goal -- and you are definitely NOT in that camp. You do, however, have folks in that camp chiming in.

In my view, anything worth doing is worth doing well -- with the corollary that if you aren't at least trying to do it well, for god's sake, just quit doing it!

[Modernist]

[Malislamusrex]

1st year I made like 100 lesson plans.

This year 0.

[vchampea]